Book Review

Tyrannosaurus rex is a superstar, all right. But this small book for dinokids is about one real ancient lizard, not about fictional animation. It tells the story of who found it and where and how the bones were taken home and put together and what they tell, a tale not yet finished.

Kathy Wankel and her ranching family in eastern Montana often walk the badlands nearby looking for fossils. In 1988 they spotted the tips of a few brownish bones sticking out of the ground. They took a few to the Museum at Bozeman, where Jack Horner studies dinosaurs. The lucky find turned out to be a complete skeleton with the first arm bones of T. rex ever seen.

... Even in the few years since Kathy's, two more are being worked on, out of only ten found this century. The sites are marked here on the map, and you will also see how four or five museums once decided to mount their fearsome specimens. ...some day we'll all know what the tyrant lizard king really could do outside the animator's studio.

~ Philip amd Phylis Morrison, Scientific American exerpt