Wankel, alongside her husband Tom, had stumbled upon the skeletal remains of a T. rex, one that roamed the region some 66 million years before its kind terrorized Jeff Goldblum and devoured a man who spent his final moments playing hide-and-seek on a toilet.
The discovery was one of just eight, at the time, to have been unearthed since Henry Fairfield Osborn first described the species in 1905. About 50 T. rex specimens have been found since.
After spending nearly a year figuring out who owned the final resting place of the “Wankel T. rex,” members of the Army Corps of Engineers began to dig.
Over the span of several years, the team, which included paleontologists Jack Horner and Pat Leiggi, then the chief fossil preparatory at Montana State University, methodically excavated the earth concealing a 38-foot-long skeleton that weighed nearly six tons and was almost 90 percent intact. It was the first such specimen to have been discovered with the bones of its comically small lower arm fully intact.
Since 2014 Wankel’s T. rex has called Washington’s Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History home. The Army Corps of Engineers, still the legal owners of the skeleton, agreed to a 50-year loan to the Smithsonian, where an estimated seven million visitors can see it annually — during years not beset by COVID-19.
Once displayed in its original “death pose,” a 2019 renovation to the museum saw the dinosaur stand up and stretch its legs the first time in 66 million years.
Today, the T. rex can be seen biting the head of a fossilized triceratops, which some speculate may have been the strong-willed Cera of “Land Before Time” fame.
“People can think he killed it, but maybe he just found it,” Kirk Johnson, the director of the museum told the Post.
“It’s best to be clear about where your knowledge ends and speculation begins.”