This article is part of the museum's special section about how museums strive to offer visitors even more to see, do, and feel.
If you've ever wanted to see, touch, and smell what life was like when dinosaurs walked the earth, you've come to the right place.
This month, the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences will launch an exhibit that recreates a primeval paradise using scents and sounds that mimic ancient forests. The museum in downtown Raleigh will also feature prehistoric murals and a trove of fossils intended to, in Javan Sutton's words, “take visitors back to the Cretaceous period.”
“We would love to take you there,” said Sutton, the museum's director of exhibitions and digital media.
This sensual feast aims to captivate young audiences and inspire them to fall in love with science. At the same time, paleontologists want to engage in science publicly, allowing visitors to participate in a process that has been limited by the private ownership of many important fossil finds, but which still remains an existential question about Earth. It is the best way to answer such questions.
But the real star is a completely different animal – perhaps literally. That's because the exhibit also marks the first public appearance of what many paleontologists consider to be the best fossils they've spent years debating.
When these incredibly intact fossils were discovered in 2006, the bone hunters who discovered them in sandstone in Montana dubbed them “Dueling Dinosaurs.” Because it featured something like a triceratops and a tyrannosaurus locked in a deadly battle. But was it really a Tyrannosaurus rex?
One creature was clearly a triceratops, as it had the thick leaf-eating skull and rhinoceros-like horns depicted in the original “Jurassic Park.” (Remember the sick dinosaur that foreshadows the chaos of the movie, the one with the giant pile of dung that Laura Dern's character shoves her hand into?).
But the strange little predator that stopped time next to it, wrapped around the Triceratops in a death grip, had the characteristics of a Tyrannosaurus in every way except size.
Was it a Tyrannosaurus? perhaps. But with its small body and tiny skull, it seemed too small to be Old Rex.
His age was also a mystery. Perhaps, paleontologists say, it's just a juvenile Tyrannosaurus rex that hasn't fully grown yet.
Or maybe it wasn't Rex?
“Our hope is to settle this controversy,” said Lindsay Zanno, director of paleontology at the North Carolina Museum.
She said that during the exhibit, staff scientists will perform a series of tests on the fossils and study the duelists in a laboratory that is visible to the public. They will compare the fossils to known Tyrannosaurus bones and also measure growth patterns and other abnormalities.
This is not the first small rex ever discovered, but it is the most complete one to date.
The controversy over the identity of this mysterious dinosaur began in 1942 when another strange 22-inch skull was discovered in Montana. Paleontologists have since wondered whether similar Lilliputian finds were juvenile tyrannosaurs or a new species, named Nanotyrannus.
Since then, this debate has raged among dinosaur experts, both online and IRL.
Thomas Kerr, an associate professor of biology at Carthage College, said answers came slowly because most of the major discoveries were “unearthed by professional fossil hunters, not scientists.” These people are more interested in earning Tyrannosaurus-sized salaries than in “answering scientific questions,” he added.
This challenge speaks to a little-known and ethically murky corner of science. When the best specimens are in private hands, researchers are stuck with bone fragments and fragments.
Fossils are increasingly becoming a luxury item, Kerr said. It often belongs to the ultra-rich, “In other words, it is not displayed in public museums. (He added that as long as the dinosaur bones weren't dug up on public land, it's perfectly legal to own them.)
In 2020, a Tyrannosaurus rex named Stan sold for a record $31.8 million to an unknown buyer. In this environment, many scientists are concerned that private fossil sales could lead to the loss of important data that could help answer pressing questions about prehistoric life.
“According to recent estimates, there are over 100 Tyrannosaurus specimens in existence,” Zanno said. “Nearly half are in private collections and cannot be accessed scientifically.”
She and other researchers hope that by discovering more information about this mysterious species, they will be able to explain how dinosaurs evolved and how that evolution contributed to their extinction. I hope that it will be able to shed light on its rise and fall.
That's why the discovery of dueling dinosaurs is so special. This is a complete skeleton that is seemingly perfect. But how do we interpret differences such as thin noses and knife-like teeth?
“The reality is we don't know about duelists because they haven't been studied,” Carr said, suggesting Nanotyrannus is a possibility. It's just a young tyrannosaurus, not a new, separate species.
The legal battles left the duelists mired in a quagmire. until now.
In 2020, after years of litigation, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the duelists belonged to the family that owned the ranch where they were discovered.
Zanno said a deal was quickly struck to send the fossils to the North Carolina State Museum after its nonprofit arm raised about $14 million to purchase the fossils.
But even she warns that it will still take years to find answers. “It's not as simple as 'Is it a Tyrannosaurus or not?'” she says.
“We need to figure out what these individual tyrannosaurs are and how many types there are,” she added of all the other small tyrannosaurid samples.
Zanno said her team has already “scanned data from 92 Tyrannosaurus specimens from museums around the world.”
The researchers will use these scans to determine whether the bones of this dueling dinosaur belong to “a slightly different looking individual or a much smaller and older specimen,” she said. Ta.
One hypothesis is that there are multiple species of Tyrannosaurus. “We need to test all of these ideas.”
First, the 67-million-year-old bones must be painstakingly removed from the giant deposit box and thoroughly cleaned. The bones are then scanned with a CT scan and a 3D scanner so paleontologists can compare the results.
Professor Kerr, from the University of Carthage, said subtle differences in bones were normal for all species. He warned that the differences the museum found through these scans could also be misleading because there were “very few specimens to compare.”
For these reasons, Zanno said the exhibit, which took four years to plan and create, has no immediate answers. But while paleontologists carry out their research, the public can see the fossils being studied in real time in a glass-enclosed paleontology lab and another half-glass wall, where visitors can You can ask questions to paleontologists. If there is a great moment, your visitors will be there to witness it.
Special fossils are also on display, and you can see and touch them up close.
One of the questions the research team, like other paleontologists, is trying to investigate is how devastating the mass extinction that wiped out dinosaurs like T. rex was.
“Tyrannosaurus was incredibly specialized, given the climate change that led to accelerated extinction,” said Holly Woodward, professor of anatomy and paleontology at Oklahoma State University. “If you remove one specialized herbivore from the chain, the Tyrannosaurus rex becomes extinct. That happened then, and the same thing happens today with all kinds of carnivores. Possible. Think about what happens next.”
That's why closing these gaps is so important, Zanno said. And why are these fossils so important?
“Fossils are not art objects,” Zanno says. “Fossils are data about ourselves, our planet, and our stories. And we need to protect it for future generations. Every time we lose a Tyrannosaurus on the public market, we We will lose the opportunity to answer this question and many others. It's all about our history.”