With 170 of its 300-odd bones preserved, this scientifically important but privately owned skeleton is currently at the Museum für Naturkunde in Berlin, Germany. This nearly whole, deep-black skull belongs to the most complete specimen of Tyrannosaurus rex on display in Europe, an individual nicknamed Tristan Otto. By that point in the field season, all they had on hand to celebrate the occasion was a bottle of scotch-hence the nickname. rex's discovery, the field crew wanted to raise a toast to the creature. Scotty has actually been known to paleontologists since 1991, when its bones were dug up at a site in Saskatchewan, Canada. “It would not surprise me that those animals turn out to increase the range of body size-potentially to overlap or even surpass what we know from T. “As more specimens of those other theropods are found, we're going to find their Scottys: their particularly large, particularly old individuals,” says study leader Scott Persons, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Alberta. rex is one of the best represented extinct dinosaurs, with more than 20 fossil individuals identified. The find suggests that large predatory dinosaurs probably got older and bigger than paleontologists would have surmised based on currently available fossils. “It was not an easy life, even for the king of predatory dinosaurs, judging by all these injuries,” says Nizar Ibrahim, a paleontologist at the University of Detroit Mercy who wasn't involved with the study. The dinosaur's remains include a broken and healed rib, a massive growth of bone in between two teeth-a sign of infection-and broken tailbones possibly maimed by another tyrannosaur's bite. Some 68 million years ago, the Canadian landscape Scotty knew was a subtropical coastal paradise-but life was no vacation. Learn which ones were the largest and the smallest, what dinosaurs ate and how they behaved, as well as surprising facts about their extinction. Over a thousand dinosaur species once roamed the Earth.
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