IT’S not always easy to pinpoint the exact time and place an icon was born. But for T. rex, it all began 100 years ago, on the pages of The New York Times.
“This new Tyrant saurian,” wrote palaeontologists Henry Fairfield Osborn and Barnum Brown from the American Museum of Natural History in New York, “is declared to be the king of kings in the domain of animal life. It was the most agile monster of his generation, a fighting machine that preyed upon herbivorous neighbours twice his own size.”
It was a pretty bold statement. At the time, all the two men had to back it up were a pair of legs, a pelvis, an arm that they weren’t even sure came from the same specimen, and fragments of skull, backbone and ribs. But as they shouted their discovery from the rooftops, Osborn and Brown spawned one of the most enduring animal icons of all time: an image that has found its way onto everything from breakfast cereal boxes to album covers, and is just about the only species that can reliably be identified by 7-year-olds.
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Now, a century after T. rex was revealed to the world, the real story of the making of a monster has come to light. According to the archives of the American Museum of Natural History, the dinosaur’s meteoric rise was anything but inevitable. The timing – and more importantly, the tone – of Osborn and Brown’s announcement was a carefully planned publicity stunt designed to pip a rival team of palaeontologists to the post. In fact, if it weren’t for the ambitions of Osborn and Brown, a healthy dose of competition, and some clever marketing, there is every chance that Tyrannosaurus would be just another dinosaur with an unpronounceable name.
Dino-wars
The race to claim the discovery of T. rex began in 1902. Barnum Brown was a young and talented field palaeontologist with an uncanny knack for finding dinosaurs. His mentor, Henry Fairfield Osborn, was founder and vice-president of the American Museum of Natural History. Together they organised annual fossil gathering expeditions to remote parts of North America.
In early 1902 Brown’s friend William Hornaday, director of the New York Zoological Park, showed him a piece of triceratops horn found in Hell Creek in the Montana badlands, an area largely unexplored by geologists. Within weeks Brown had organised an expedition to Montana.
Hell Creek was remote, inhospitable and prone to bouts of extreme weather. The expedition was dogged by setbacks and illness, and most of the fossils they found were poorly preserved. On 12 August Brown wrote to Osborn expressing his disappointment, but added that, despite his woes, he may have found something special. “The bones of a large carnivorous dinosaur. I have never seen anything like it from the Cretaceous.”
The dinosaur’s remains were on a steep slope inaccessible to horses, making heavy lifting impossible. After battling hard sandstone, extreme heat and sunstroke for several weeks they gave up, with only a pubic bone and a femur to show for their efforts.
Back in New York, Osborn was tense. In Brown’s absence the Carnegie Museum in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, had unveiled a diplodocus skeleton, which prompted a public sensation and even a visit from the British king, Edward VII. Not to be outdone, Osborn set about making room at his own museum for the full-size brontosaurus (apatosaurus) skeleton, which Brown had found in Wyoming in 1897, a move which brought in over half a million visitors. It was clear that museums could make a lot of money from dinosaurs. It was also clear that a fierce rivalry was building up between Pittsburgh and New York.
This rivalry had begun when Andrew Carnegie, inspired by the specimens Brown had collected on his first expedition for the American Museum in 1898, decided to give dinosaurs a starring role in his new Pittsburgh museum. He began by gathering some of the country’s top palaeontologists, including one of Osborn’s own staff, Jacob Wortman.
“Osborn and Brown began a publicity offensive, promoting T. rex as the most ferocious monster ever to walk the Earth”
By 1905 Osborn was ready to up the stakes. Perhaps the “large carnivorous dinosaur” Brown had abandoned in 1902 would be the biggest crowd-puller yet, stealing public attention back from the Carnegie Museum. They would need to go back to Montana and hope for better weather.
Brown arrived at Hell Creek on 24 June 1905 with six of the strongest horses he could find, two assistants and several cases of dynamite. The heat was on – Wortman had tipped off his new colleagues in Pittsburgh about Hell Creek and the Carnegie team had scoured the area just weeks before. Rumour had it they were already busy identifying the skull of a large carnivore. Luckily for Brown, they had missed his specimen, and after three months of extensive dynamiting and back-breaking pickaxe work, the team unearthed the legs, pelvis and parts of the backbone, ribs, one arm and fragments of skull.
The skeleton wasn’t complete, but there was enough to justify naming a new species. Osborn, desperate to finish ahead of Carnegie, started writing about the find before he had even seen any of the bones, choosing a name designed to thrill the public. In late July Osborn wrote to tell Brown: “I have just described the big dinosaur under the name Tyranosaurus rex [sic]”. The tyrant lizard king.
Osborn’s initial paper “Tyrannosaurus and other Cretaceous Carnivorous Dinosaurs” was published in the Bulletin of the American Museum of Natural History in October 1905. He acted in the nick of time. The skull the Carnegie team had found was from the same species, and the Pittsburgh museum was planning to name the new dinosaur for itself.
In December 1905, as the New York bones were being assembled, Osborn and Brown began a publicity offensive, promoting T. Rex as the most ferocious monster ever to walk the Earth. Yet despite the great fanfare, the unveiling of T. rex was an almighty flop. The incomplete skeleton failed to thrill the public, and while diplodocus, brontosaurus and stegosaurus were household names, T. rex remained relatively unknown.
In Pittsburgh, the Carnegie Museum conceded defeat over T. rex and returned to hunting Jurassic dinosaurs in Wyoming. Osborn, however, refused to give up on his monster and repeatedly sent Brown to Montana to look for more fragments of T. rex. On 1 July 1908 Brown was prospecting a treacherous quicksand area close to Hell Creek when he spied some bones poking out of the hillside. A few days later Brown announced that he had unearthed another T. rex skeleton. And this time only the leg bones were missing.
It took seven years to clean and mount the new skeleton, ample time for Osborn’s publicity machine to go into overdrive, and despite the best efforts of palaeontologists around the world, by the time it went on display in 1915 the American Museum’s skeleton was still the most complete T. rex in existence.
This time the public couldn’t fail to be impressed, and within weeks news was travelling around the world inspiring a flurry of newspaper and magazine articles and requests for casts from museums across the globe. Gradually the name T. rex entered the public’s consciousness.
But the marketing didn’t stop there. Brown, now in charge of promoting the museum’s dinosaurs, became something of a movie agent.
In late 1915 Brown was approached by Willis O’Brien and Herbert Dawley, amateur film-makers and pioneers of stop-motion animation, who wanted to recreate battling dinosaurs on screen. The result was a jerkily animated T. Rex in the 1919 movie The Ghost of Slumber Mountain, followed by a small walk-on part in the screen adaptation of Conan Doyle’s The Lost World. But it was O’Brien’s 1933 film King Kong that finally brought T. rex to life as the monster that Osborn and Brown had always described.
From that moment the dinosaur took on a life of its own, with a succession of B-movie roles including The Land Unknown, The Beast of Hollow Mountain, King Dinosaur and Dinosaurus, showing an oversized and morphologically incorrect dinosaur on the rampage, destroying everything in its path. Nothing, not even the discovery of bigger and fiercer dinosaurs, could topple the world’s most famous monster, and T. rex remains the most popular dinosaur in the world to this day. No doubt Osborn and Brown would be proud of their protégé’s achievements. “[T. rex] is my favourite child,” Brown would say. “The most formidable fighting machine ever devised by Nature.”
What's in a name?
Part of the public appeal of T. rex is the snappy and pronounceable name, which translates as “tyrant lizard king”, chosen by Osborn in 1905. However, the dinosaur that Osborn fought so hard to promote should, by rights, have been called Manospondylus gigas, meaning “large thin vertebrae”.
Until recently taxonomic rules stated that the earliest name given to a specimen is the most valid. This famously led to the better-known name brontosaurus being replaced by its older title apatosaurus in 1974. In 1905, when Osborn named T. rex, he was unaware that fragments of bone belonging to this species had already been named Manospondylus gigas by Edward Cope of the University of Pennsylvania in 1892.
Osborn realised his mistake in 1916, but decided to ignore the older name. In the following decades palaeontologists muttered about a possible breach of the rules, but nobody wanted to be responsible for killing off a scientific icon.
Fortunately for the T. rex, a change in the international taxonomic rules from 1 January 2000 means that a name of 50 years’ standing is allowed to take precedence over any older titles. The lizard king is here to stay.
An image problem
When Osborn and Brown unveiled their complete T. rex skeleton in 1915 they made a number of errors that took decades to correct. Firstly, attaching the slim 1908 skeleton to the large legs found in 1905 produced an effect that Thomas Holtz, a palaeontologist at the University of Maryland, College Park, describes as like placing “Arnold Schwarzenegger’s legs on Brad Pitt’s body”.
There was also the issue of the arms. Osborn at first refused to believe that T. rex could have had such tiny arms, though he was talked round by Brown. However, none of the hand bones was preserved, so Osborn and Brown gave their tyrannosaur three fingers, like an allosaurus. In 1914 new fossil finds suggested that T. rex had probably been two-fingered, but Brown ignored this and all the movies he advised on featured a three-fingered dinosaur.
In the late 1930s Brown realised his mistake, but by then it was too late. Three-fingered tyrannosaurs were still being portrayed in films long after Brown’s death in 1963. Ironically, in 1997 a T. rex skeleton was discovered that did have a third finger, though it is so small that it would not have been visible on the hand.
The other significant errors with the 1915 skeleton were its tail, which was much too long, and its “sit up and beg” posture, which would have made walking extremely difficult. Both these mistakes were corrected in 1992 when the American Museum of Natural History dismantled and repositioned the dinosaur in a low, stalking pose.
