No creature in the history of planet Earth sparks the imagination quite like Tyrannosaurus rex. But how do we separate the movie-monster myth from the actual animal? Victoria the T-rex, a traveling exhibition currently visiting Melbourne Museum in Australia sets the record straight with recent discoveries about what T-rex looked and sounded like, how it sensed the world, and how it hunted.
Discovered in South Dakota, USA, in 2013, Victoria is an impressive specimen of an impressive species. Composed of 199 bones, standing 3.6 m (11.8 ft) tall and more than 12 m (40 ft) long, Victoria is the second-largest known T-rex skeleton after Sue, the famous specimen (and prolific tweeter) that resides in the Field Museum in Chicago.
She may be 66 million years old, but Victoria doesn’t look a day over 25 – because she died between her 15th and 25th birthdays. But looking at her bones in detail, it seems she managed to live a very full life in that time, including everything from mortal combat to motherhood.
“That’s the key appeal of seeing an original fossil skeleton,” Tim Ziegler, Museums Victoria Research Institute's Collection Manager of Vertebrate Paleontology, told me as we looked out at the dinosaur. “We can go beyond the model, go beyond the illustration of this dinosaur, the concept of a Tyrannosaurus, to an individual. That’s one of the best parts of paleontology, to see the life of an animal, despite it coming from deep time, from so long before us.”
Dr. Matthew Carrano, Curator of Dinosauria at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History, agrees.
“Just like with people, right, each one is quite distinct from the next one,” Carrano told me over the phone. “And it's nice to have so many individuals because then you start to maybe fill out what T-rex was like. Most dinosaurs we only have one of, and so you sort of hope it's a typical one. But you don't really always get the typical ones.”
In the presence of a king
Tyrannosaurus rex is the first dinosaur that pretty much every kid latches onto, and that fascination and fear stays with you for a lifetime. No animal alive today cuts quite as striking a figure.
If you haven’t had the chance to see one in real life, it’s impossible to overstate how flat-out cool the experience is. Even if the pressures of adulthood have long since crushed your childlike sense of wonder about dinosaurs, coming face to face with a Tyrannosaurus will bring it roaring back.
That promise is the main appeal of the exhibition, and its effectiveness is stunning. Victoria’s giant, grinning skull greets you as you round the first corner, and it’s alarming to realize how easily you would fit right in there, with room for a side dish. This is the dinosaur’s real skull – tipping the scales at an incredible 139 kg (306 lb), it’s too heavy to be mounted on the skeleton itself.
Later in the exhibition, you sneak through the underbrush of the Cretaceous jungle, catching glimpses of T-rexes going about their day-to-day lives from behind logs and between leaves. Then you turn a corner – and there’s the actual Tyrannosaurus, mid-sprint, jaws agape, bearing down on you. The evocative pose made me freeze like a deer in headlights, almost reluctant to even approach. An impressive feat for a creature that’s been dead for 66 million years.
Standing in its presence, the T-rex somehow feels even bigger than the movies made it out to be. And while we might mentally lump it in with other movie monsters like the Alien or Predator, it’s easy to forget that this thing actually lived. It ate, and cared for its young, and enjoyed a good snooze in the Sun. Tyrannosaurus rex was just an animal – albeit, one of the largest meat-eating animals ever to stalk the Earth.
It’s easy to lose your sense of time, staring at this creature from out of time. But to a paleontologist, this skeleton is loaded with clues about how this animal lived, both as a species and as an individual.
Victoria’s inner life
Victoria is one of around 30 known Tyrannosaurus rex skeletons, and while each is different, the stories these bones tell have some commonalities. As you might expect, the lives of these animals were punctuated with violence.
Easy to miss at a glance, Victoria’s right shoulder sports bony growths that, to the trained eye, indicate a major injury. Whether through combat or a bad fall, at some stage the dinosaur’s arm muscle pulled away from the bone, causing that bone to grow towards the muscle to compensate.
A more serious injury is visible in her vertebrae. Several of them have been crushed, and fused back together, which tells scientists that Victoria actually broke her neck at some point, and survived long enough for it to heal. But another battle scar may have dealt a death blow.
Tyrannosaurus tooth marks are as unique as fingerprints – each of those chompers measured up to 30 cm (12 in) long and was serrated like a steak knife. Flesh didn’t stand a chance, and even bone might have been no match.
“We have good evidence that T-rex was able to crush bone with its teeth, which is not the common thing for these big dinosaurs,” said Dr. Carrano. “An unusual aspect of the teeth of T-rex is that they're really fat, like bananas, rather than just a slender blade, which is more common in the predatory dinosaur. We have holes in Triceratops fossils that are made by these teeth, so we know they can punch holes in the bone.”
Victoria herself bears these bite marks in her lower jaw, and while she may have walked away from an immediate attack, the underlying damage could have sealed her doom. Deep scars in the bones of her face and jaw are evidence of a major infection. Such a lifestyle might explain why T-rexes rarely lived past 30.
Movie mythbusting
Growing up, Jurassic Park was, and probably still is, my favorite movie. I don’t think there’s another film I’ve seen more times, and gun to my head I could probably perform it from memory in its entirety. As a kid, I had recurring nightmares about being stalked by its stars – but that never stopped me popping the tape back into the VCR the next morning. The idea of seeing a real-life T-rex utterly terrified me, but even so the thrill would be irresistible if you offered me a time machine or a dodgy zoo.
And I was far from the only one. The movie’s realistic depictions of dinosaurs inspired a “Jurassic generation” of new paleontologists, who went on to make a flurry of discoveries. Not only did we learn more about the classics, but new species turn up regularly – which then feed back into the movies. The tiny T-rex relative, Moros intrepidus, was discovered in 2019 and appeared on-screen in a Jurassic film by 2022.
But while the original Jurassic Park may have had the most scientifically accurate movie dinosaurs of its time, it still took plenty of creative liberties that annoy scientists to this day.
One of the more heinous examples concerns velociraptors, which weren’t scaly, 6-ft, door-opening monsters; they were turkey-sized, feathered ankle-biters. Furthermore, there’s no fossil evidence that Dilophosaurus had a neck frill or spat venom – but it sure made for a cool death scene for Newman from Seinfeld.
And of course, the main attraction itself wasn’t spared its own dose of Hollywoodification. The movie’s T-rex famously had vision that was based on movement, which gave the hapless humans an easy escape route by sitting still. But you wouldn’t last long if you tried that in real life – Tyrannosaurus had the largest eyes of any known land animal, as well as excellent depth perception and an expanded spectrum of color vision. Stand still in front of one of these monsters, and you’d be dead long before you could say “life finds a way.”
And even if it was totally blind, if you crouched close enough to a T-rex’s snout for its breath to knock your hat off, it would definitely smell you. Studies of its brain cavity revealed overdeveloped olfactory regions compared to other dinosaurs, suggesting a keen sense of smell.
Both of these senses are explored in the Victoria the T-rex exhibition. Interactive displays let visitors compare the eyesight and smelling prowess of Tyrannosaurus to that of humans and other dinosaurs.
Sadly, even the iconic roar of Jurassic Park’s T-rex is probably inaccurate. Recent research suggests they were more likely to make closed-mouth coos and booms, like emus or crocodiles. According to Dr. Carrano, roaring is a mammal thing.
“Reptiles just aren't very noisy,” he told me. “What they're not doing is yelling at something that they're trying to catch. It’s a very movie thing, they stand there and yell at it. It's totally ridiculous, if you're trying to actually catch something. But it's kind of the stock-in-trade of how you set up that scene in a movie. So, I think hunting and all the sort of exciting bits are probably pretty quiet most of the time.”
Even the prelude to the hunt was probably a lot quieter than we might think. In the movies, the T-rex’s appearance is often foreshadowed by dramatic footsteps, heavy enough to shake the ground. But again, broadcasting your presence isn’t a great tactic for a predator.
By comparing the animal’s foot bones with fossilized footprints, scientists have deduced that T-rex seems to have had thick pads on the bottom of its feet, which would have cushioned its footfalls. So you wouldn’t get the courtesy of a rippling glass of water or puddle to warn you; terrifyingly, Tyrannosaurus attacks might well have come out of nowhere.
On the plus side, if you did see it coming you could probably outrun it on foot at a brisk jog. The scene in the first movie of the T-rex chasing down the Jeep – and keeping up for a while – would probably be way less exciting in real life.
“I think T-rex is probably not running a lot of things down,” Dr. Carrano told me. “I don't think it needs to. Most animals that T-rex would eat are slower than a T-rex, so, you know, it doesn't need to be a cheetah.”
Scales or feathers?
With new research over the last 20 years or so, the looks of many dinosaurs have been updated with feathers. So did the T-rex look like the giant scaly reptile seen in the movies, or was it more of a big bird?
Funnily enough, this is one point where the movies might be right – at least for Tyrannosaurus. Dinosaurs in the raptor family do seem to be covered in early versions of feathers, as do some of T-rex’s ancestors – but not T-rex itself.
“We don't really see good evidence for much of a feathery covering,” explained Dr. Carrano. “But the very small Jurassic animals that were sort of the beginning of the lineage that T-rex belongs to, these animals were covered in a filament-like feather.”
It may be that these dinosaurs shed their feathers as they evolved into bigger forms.
“Having insulation may not be advantageous if you're very large,” said Carrano. “Overheating would be a problem, the way elephants tend not to be shaggy unless they're living in very cold climates as mammoths. And, you know, T-rex is living in quite a warm environment.”
In fact, elephants might be a good example of how “feathery” T-rex was.
“You get up close, you can see it's got hair,” Dr. Carrano told me. “Like, you think of an elephant more as [having] skin rather than hair, and that's probably a better model for what T-rex may have had in terms of feathers or feather-like structures.”
The exhibition explores this too. Visitors can design their own holograms of what they think T-rex looked like, in terms of color or feathers, and their creations are rated on a plausibility scale.
Jazz hands
Our final question is one everybody has wondered at some point: what were those comically tiny hands for? One hypothesis suggests they’re vestigial – evolutionary leftovers that are slowly withering away with neglect.
“If you track this from the early relatives of a Tyrannosaur all the way up to T-rex, they start out with very long arms and three big long fingers, and they get smaller and go down to the two fingers,” Dr. Carrano said. “The size of those arms, they're not grabbing things. They're not helping to kill.”
That said, those arms aren’t quite as useless as they look, which suggests that maybe they did still serve some function.
“All the arm joints are there, it’s got a perfectly decent shoulder blade,” said Dr. Carrano. “There's muscles attaching from the arm to the shoulders. So the arm is a mobile structure as it always was. It's not like when you look at a flightless bird and sometimes there's just like a stick left.”
Common hypotheses include that the arms help the heavy dinosaur stand up after sitting on the ground, or to grasp mates during reproduction, for digging nests, grooming, scratching themselves, or any number of things we haven’t imagined. There’s a good chance we’ll never know.
There’s just so much to ponder when you’re staring up at the gigantic remains of one of planet Earth’s most intriguing lifeforms.
Victoria the T-rex is visiting Melbourne Museum until October 20.
