Saskatchewan’s own Scotty has recently been declared the largest tyrannosaurus rex ever found, which also makes it the largest meat-eating specimen ever found. This is additions to its titles as one of the most complete T.rex skeletons ever found and the first found in Saskatchewan.
Scotty weighs in at an estimated 8,870kg, surpassing the previous record-holder fossil — Sue from the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago — by about 400kg.
The skeleton was discovered near Eastend in 1991, and paleontologists recovered 65 per cent of the 65-million-year-old T.rex’s fossilized bones, an incredibly complete skeleton as far as dinosaurs go.
The paper revealing Scotty’s accomplishment was written by paleontologists from the University of Alberta and Florida State University, comparing various discovered T.rex remains; a draft version also concluded that Scotty was around 30 years old at the time of death, and still cannot be determined whether the newly anointed king of dinosaurs was male or female.
A replica of Scotty lives at the T.rex Discovery Centre in Eastend, and there are now plans to add another replica to the Royal Saskatchewan Museum in Regina, which means Scotty will soon be welcoming visitors to celebrate this accomplishment.
More information about the T.rex Discovery Centre and about Scotty can be found on the Royal Saskatchewan Museum’s website.
