How Smithsonian Fossil Preparators Are Re-Excavating a Tyrannosaur From Its Past on Display #fossil #paleontology #tyrannosaur #dinosaur #smithsonian

The Gorgosaurus skeleton in the museum’s Hall of Dinosaurs and Fossil Reptiles exhibition in 1963. Smithsonian Institution

Smithsonian Magazine's National Fossil Day post looks at a tyrannosaur specimen that has been on display for many years.  The animal, Gorgosaurus libratus, had been at the museum since 1918.  It was found in the rugged badlands around the Red Deer River in Alberta, Canada.  It lived about 75 million years ago during the Cretaceous Period.  Barnum Brown discovered this specimen between 1913 and 1914 along with another specimen.  It was later traded to the Smithsonian for a Barosaurus neck.

The Red Deer River’s rich assembly of dinosaur bones has attracted paleontologists for more than a century. In the 1910s, famed fossil hunters Barnum Brown, who had previously discovered the first T. rex skeleton in Montana, and Charles Sternberg scoured these badlands for spectacular dinosaur skeletons, some of which sported imprints of fossilized skin.

It was Brown who discovered the nearly complete skeletons of two Gorgosaurus individuals between 1913 and 1914. Brown shipped these specimens back to his employer, the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH) in New York City (a third nearly intact Gorgosaurus was discovered by Sternberg and also ended up at AMNH). To prepare them for exhibition, the Gorgosaurus skeletons were partially entombed in plaster and mounted in relief like sculptures protruding out of a wall.

The 1913 Gorgosaurus skeleton was positioned in the “death pose” in which it was discovered. The tyrannosaur’s head and neck are bent backwards over its hip as its tail, which is largely missing and instead painted on, wraps around its ankles. The dramatic mount was originally displayed at AMNH alongside the other Gorgosaurus skeletons. But the skeleton was deemed expendable. “Brown found quite a few other tyrannosaur specimens in those years up in Alberta, most of which remained at AMNH — and that’s probably why they were willing to trade this one,” Carrano said.

In 1933, AMNH traded the mounted Gorgosaurus, alongside the skeleton of a strange horse-like beast from Nebraska named Moropus, to the Smithsonian for the elongated neck of a Barosaurus, a sauropod dinosaur from Utah. A towering cast of this sauropod specimen now dominates AMNH’s entryway.