Hello Trix! The queen of the Tyrannosaurus Rex
The Tyrannosaurus Rex is finally in The Netherlands! In Naturalis Biodiversity Center – shortly known as Naturalis – in Leiden. Last week I have visited this special exhibition named ‘T. Rex in Town’. And shortly we call the dinosaur Trix.
The project
It all started back in 2012 when the director of Naturalis Edwin van Huis said: “We should really have a T. rex.”. The project started wit researchers from Naturalis traveling through the United States. Looking for a T. rex. A skeleton was found in Montana in September 2013 and the project became bigger, the bones were carefully excavated and prepared by making plaster molds and packed them carefully into big wooden crates. Every piece had its own crate, specification, number, place and live tracks.
Nearly three years later on a friday, August 26th, the T. rex arrived in Leiden. And accompanied by the police colonne, the paleontologist Anne Schulp and biologist Freek Vonk; Trix arrived at Naturalis. The queen of the dinosaurs with a length that reaches 12 metres, the scale who shows the dinosaur weighed 6000 kilos at least, you can now visit in Naturalis!
Read on…
The Exhibition
This ‘T. Rex in Town’ is open until June 5th, 2017. The rest of the beautiful musem that consists of conservated stuffed animals, minerals, fossils, bones and so on – what you normally see in a nature history museum – is closed due to renovation until the end of 2018. That takes so long! I can’t wait to visit it again which I luckily have done recently during the summer.
This female Tyrannosaurus Rex we also call shortly Trix, lived 66 million years ago. She is found in North America near Wayong in Montana – and a triceratops in Wyongming – by Anne Schulp and Pete Lanson their team. Before they transported any of the bones, they used a protective coating as soon as they exposed a bone. Then they made a mall of plaster cast – so a kind of copy of the bone. And then they started puzzlin’ all the pieces together. Her left leg was missing so they scanned and copied the right leg and 3D printed the missing left leg. They also discovered how big her brain must have been by scanning the head and calculating the cavities in the head.
The dinosaur is presented in the exhibition in a attack posture and I only show a photo of the gigantic head. The full image including the whole tail is immense for the thought of being once an animal, so I leave that up to your imagination or when you are able to visit this exhibition, to not have spoiled it. It is the most complete – so far – and one of the youngest adult dinosaur found ever. She was the youngest in meaning of one of the last living in the dinosaur era.
At the end of 2018, when the restorations of the museum have finished, she will have a honored place in the dinosaur hall of the new museum.
When you not have planned any holiday yet for 2019….I could recommend a roundtrip through The Netherlands including this exhibition and it is close to all the other major cities in The Netherlands (like everything haha maximum 3 hour distance by public transport or car).
Have you been to a dinosaur exhibition?
Greeting by Sophie
