This article is part of our special Museums section on how institutions are trying to offer their visitors more to see, do and feel.
If you’ve ever wanted to see, touch or even smell what life was like when dinosaurs walked the earth, this is the place.
This month, the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences is opening a report which will use scents and sounds that mimic an ancient forest to recreate a primeval paradise. The downtown Raleigh museum will also feature prehistoric murals and a fossil vault meant to transport visitors “back to the Cretaceous,” as Javan Sutton put it.
“We really want to take you there,” said Sutton, the museum’s director of exhibits and digital media.
This sensual celebration aims to captivate young audiences and inspire them to fall in love with science. At the same time, paleontologists hope to engage science in the public, allowing visitors in on a process that has been limited by the private ownership of many important fossil finds, but is still the best route to answering existential questions about the planet.
But the real showman is a whole other animal – perhaps literally. That’s because the exhibit also debuts what many paleontologists consider the best fossils ever—ones they’ve spent years arguing over.
When these incredibly intact fossils were discovered in 2006, the bone hunter who found them in the Montana sandstone dubbed them “the dueling dinosaurs” because they featured what appeared to be a Triceratops and a Tyrannosaurus locked in a death match. But was it really a T-Rex?
One creature was obviously a Triceratops, as it had the thick skull and rhinoceros-like horn of the leaf-eater depicted in the original “Jurassic Park.” (I remember the sick dinosaur foreshadowing the mess of the movie, the one with the huge pile of manure that Laura Dern’s character sticks her hand in?).
But the strange little predator frozen in time next to him—wrapped around the Triceratops in a death grip—had the characteristics of a T. Rex in every way except size.
Was it a tyrannosaurus? It can. But with its small body and tiny skull, it looked too small to be any old Rex.
His age was also a mystery. Perhaps, paleontologists argued, it was simply a juvenile T. rex, not yet fully grown.
Or was it not Rex at all?
“Our hope is to settle the debate,” said Lindsay Zanno, head of paleontology at the North Carolina museum.
During the exhibit, he said, staff scientists will put the fossils through a series of tests, studying the gladiators in a lab right in front of the public. They will compare the fossils to known Tyrannosaurus bones, while also measuring growth patterns and other abnormalities.
This is not the first miniature Rex ever discovered, but it is by far the most complete.
Controversy over the identity of this mysterious dinosaur began in 1942, when another strange 22-inch skull was found in Montana. Since then, paleontologists have wondered whether similar Lilliputian finds were juvenile tyrannosaurs or a new species, which was named Nanotyrannus.
The debate has raged among dinosaur experts ever since, both online and IRL.
Answers have come slowly, said Thomas Carr, associate professor of biology at Carthage College, because most important finds “are discovered by professional fossil hunters, not scientists.” These people, he added, are more interested in earning T. Rex-sized payouts than “answering scientific questions.”
The challenge speaks to a little-known, ethically opaque corner of science: When the best specimens are in private hands, researchers are stuck with bone fragments and pieces.
Fossils are increasingly a luxury item, Carr said, objets d’art which most often belong to the extremely rich, “which means they are not exhibited in public museums.’ (He added that it’s perfectly legal to have dinosaur bones, as long as they weren’t excavated on public land.)
In 2020, a tyrannosaurus named Stan sold for a record $31.8 million to an unknown buyer. In this environment, many scientists worry that private sales of fossils will deprive them of key data to answer pressing questions about prehistoric life.
“At a recent estimate, there are over 100 specimens of T. rex,” Zanno said. “Nearly half are kept in private collections and are therefore inaccessible to science.”
She and other researchers hope that finding more information about this mysterious species could shed light on the rise and fall of all dinosaurs, explaining how they evolved and how that evolution may have contributed to their extinction.
That’s why the Dueling Dinosaurs find is so special. Here is a seemingly perfect, full skeleton. But what to make of its differences, such as its thin snout and knife-like teeth?
“The thing is, we don’t know why duels have never been studied,” said Carr, who suggests Nanotyrannus they are simply juvenile T. Rexes, not a new, separate species.
Legal battles had kept the gladiators stuck in the doldrums. So far.
In 2020, then years of the dispute, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the duels belonged to the family that owned the ranch where they were found.
Immediately after, an agreement was made to head the fossils to the North Carolina museum after his nonprofit arm raised about $14 million to buy them, according to Zanno.
But even she warns that it will take years to find answers. “It’s not as simple as ‘is it a T. rex or not,'” he said.
“We need to figure out who all these individual tyrannosaurs are and how many species we might have,” she added, referring to all the other small T. rex specimens.
Zanno said her team has already “scanned data from 92 individual tyrannosaur specimens from museums around the world.”
The team, he said, will use those scans to determine whether the bones of the dueling dinosaur came from “a slightly different-looking individual or a much smaller, larger individual.”
One hypothesis is that “there are many species of tyrannosaurs,” he said. “We need to test all these ideas.”
First the 67-million-year-old bones must be painstakingly extracted from vast sediment boxes and painstakingly cleaned. The bones will then be scanned via CT and a 3-D scanner so paleontologists can compare the results.
Subtle differences in bones are normal for all species, said Carr, the Carthage College professor. He warned that the differences the museum found through these scans could also be misleading because “there are so few samples to compare.”
For those reasons, Zanno said, the report, which took four years to design and build, won’t have answers right away. But as the paleontologists continue their work, the public will be able to see the fossils being studied in real time in a glass-walled paleontology lab and another glass half-wall where visitors can ask questions of a staff paleontologist . If there is a eureka moment, visitors will be there to witness it.
Dedicated fossils will also be on display for visitors to see up close and even touch.
One question the team – like other paleontologists – wants to explore is how catastrophic the mass extinction that killed off dinosaurs like T. rex was.
“If you think about climate change leading to accelerated extinction events, T. rex was incredibly specialized,” said Holly Woodward, a professor of anatomy and paleontology at the University of Oklahoma. “If you remove one of those links in the chain, just one specialized herbivore that it relied on, the T. rex disappears. This happened then and the same thing can happen today to any type of carnivore. Just think what’s next.”
That’s why it’s so vital to fill those gaps, Zanno said. And why these fossils are so vital.
“Fossils are not art,” Zanno said. “Fossils are facts about ourselves, our planet, our history. And we must protect it for future generations. Every time we lose a tyrannosaurus to the open market, we lose an opportunity to answer this question and so many others. It’s our whole story.”