Our speaker was Dr David Waterhouse, Curator/Director of the Polar Museum at the Scott Polar Research Institute in Cambridge.
His talk centred around a trip that he made as a PhD student in 2003, to an palaeontological site in southeastern Montana. The site was truly in the wilds and the team even had to dig its own road as it got nearer the site! David showed us an illustration of the many tools used in digging up fossils of this type, from a dental pick all the way up to even a pneumatic drill!
He showed us pictures of a Tyrannosaurus’s tooth (banana-sized), femur and foot bone, and described the laborious process of excavating the femur and then removing it to the vehicle for transportation back to the Natural History Museum in Los Angeles. It is thought that this Tyrannosaurus weighed four to five tonnes and was up to 15.2 metres long.
Only around 15 T. rex skeletons have been found so far in the world – all in North America – but some related species have been found elsewhere, e.g. in Asia.
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