by Jesse Wieten
THE HAGUE, Dec. 30 (Xinhua) -- In about one and a half years the Netherlands should have another tourist magnet with the skeleton of a Tyrannosaurus Rex at Naturalis Biodiversity Center in Leiden, the director of Naturalis told Xinhua on Tuesday.
Tyrannosaurus rex is one of the largest carnivores which has ever walked on earth, living in the late Cretaceous, 67.5 to 66 million years ago. For the first time a skeleton of the T. rex, which was found in May 2013 in the U.S. state of Montana and was excavated by Naturalis, will be exhibited on permanent display outside North America.
"We expect to have landed a huge crowd puller", Edwin van Huis, director of Naturalis, told Xinhua. "Now we're on about 300,000 visitors each year and we really hope to go to 400,000. The Netherlands attracts many tourists from Japan, Russia and China, who go to the Rijksmuseum to see Rembrandt's Night Watch or who come for the tulips, but I hope they will now come to Leiden as well. Besides being a beautiful historical city, Leiden from 2016 on will have another showpiece for its visitors."
Initial field measurements suggest the Naturalis specimen is an at least 30-year-old female, probably older, of around twelve meters long. The dinosaur skeleton is well-preserved, with hardly any distortion to the bones. Scientists have found about 75 percent of the bones in the excavation. The skull is remarkably complete; the neck, dorsal vertebrae and the better part of the tail is preserved, and the hip, part of the shoulder, and the right leg are present, too. The feet, left leg and the arms are missing.
Anne Schulp, vertebrate paleontologist and senior researcher of Naturalis, went to the United States to excavate the Tyrannosaurus rex, together with other paleontologists.
"It's an incredibly complete fossil," Schulp told Xinhua. "We are really happy. After her death she was covered by a layer of sand of three meters, therefore it was nicely conserved. The layer of sand means that it was not distorted. The bones are not crooked or flat."
The best-preserved skeleton of a T. rex still remains at the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago. Of Sue, how she was named, 85 percent of the bones were recovered. The T. rex in Naturalis will be among the best-preserved skeletons in the world. A name for the 'Dutch' T. rex will be revealed at a later stage.
Preparation of the fossil is currently in progress by the specialized Black Hills Institute in the U.S., which will also mount it in a metal frame. After that it will be put together at Naturalis, where it should make the first public appearance in mid-2016.
The T. rex skeleton was found on the property of a farmer, who automatically became the owner. As its excavator Naturalis had the first right for purchase. To get the amount of five million euros (6.1 million U.S. dollars) needed to buy it, Naturalis started fundraising.
A portion of the money was attracted through a crowd funding campaign, 'een tientje voor T. rex' (10 euros for T. rex), which brought in 230,000 euros. The rest of the 5 million euros came from companies, individuals, funds, the municipality of Leiden and Naturalis itself.
The T. rex will not only be useful as a tourist attraction. The world should know more about the ancient dinosaur as well. "What we know is what you see in a film like Jurassic Park," director Van Huis said. "These images are based on scientific research. We do not know the color, how they lived, in groups or individually? Through this skeleton, we can gain a lot of new knowledge."
"If T. rex comes to the Netherlands, we will just grill her so long until she reveals all her secrets," told paleontologist Schulp. "T. rex will be completely turned inside out. We will get a better idea what the beast used to look like, how it lived, how her surroundings looked like and who or what they ate. With each new fossil, you learn something new. I wonder what we will now discover about T. rex "
Naturalis will not work alone in exploring the secrets of the T.rex. In collaboration with Amsterdam VU University, Utrecht University, the Vrije Universiteit Brussels (Belgium), the LUMC academic hospital in Leiden and the Manchester University (Britain) Naturalis will address multiple topics such as the geological setting, the minimum age of the individual, the medical file, possible migration pattern and the locomotion of T. rex.
