((PKG)) SMITHSONIAN DINOSUAR
((Banner: T.Rex King Bone))
((Reporter: Deborah Block))
((Camera: Mike Burke))
((Adapted by: Martin Secrest))
((Map: Washington, D.C.))
((Locater: Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History, Washington, D.C.))
((Banner: The museum will open a new hall featuring a T.rex fossilized skeleton (called Nation’s T.rex) discovered in Montana in 1989))
((NATS))
((MATTHEW CARRANO, CURATOR OF DINOSAURS, NATIONAL MUSEUM OF NATURAL HISTORY))
This particular specimen is actually a pretty scientifically important specimen. When it was discovered in 1989-1990, it was the first specimen where the arm had been known. So, we always knew T.rex had a very small arm, but we’d never really seen it all. So, this is the first time we ever saw it. The biggest advances for dinosaur paleontology in the last 20 years have been around the biology of dinosaurs. We’ve started to understand how to answer questions about how they grew, how they lived, how they ate, all the things that have to do with a living animal.
((NATS))
((MATTHEW CARRANO, CURATOR OF DINOSAURS, NATIONAL MUSEUM OF NATURAL HISTORY))
Well, we now are able to look inside the bones of dinosaurs and understand how old these individuals were when they died. And what that gives us is a series of stages of their lifetime. So, what we now know is that dinosaurs went through a growth spurt, just like humans do. They started out very small, hatched from eggs, and they were teenagers. They grew very, very quickly. By the time they were about 20, they were pretty much full sized. And after that, although they, you know, got a little bit longer, and a little bit taller, mostly they just got bigger. So, they would sort of bulk up. A Tyrannosaurus is what we would call an apex predator. It ate whatever it wanted. It probably didn’t get eaten very much. It does have these fantastic six-inch teeth that we know were capable of punching through solid bone. So, dinosaurs to us now are much more about living animals than they used to be, but that’s just the tip of the iceberg. There are so many things we don’t know about their biology. We still don’t know what color they were. We don’t know the sounds they made. We don’t know what they smelled like. All the basic things you take for granted about living animals are actually the hardest things for paleontologists to learn about extinct ones. T.rex, of course, is really the centerpiece of this hall, and it’s certainly the centerpiece dinosaur for us. But we have things that had armor, plant eaters, meat eaters, things that lived 200 million years ago, to things that lived ‘only’ 66 million years ago. So, they’re going to get a real sense of just how many different kinds of dinosaurs there were on Earth.