21st Century Rex: maximising access to a privately owned Tyrannosaurus rex skeleton in the digital age

Abstract

A ~60-70% complete Tyrannosaurus rex skeleton known as Stan recently sold for 31.8 million US dollars to an unknown buyer (announced in March 2022 as the Natural History Museum Abu Dhabi), pushing up the price of all such skeletons way beyond the budget of most museums. Wealthy private individuals who purchase expensive fossil specimens sometimes put them on public display but leave them in an intellectual limbo, unable to be studied and published. However, a partial T. rex skeleton known as Titus was excavated in Montana in 2018, shipped to the UK in 2020, and had casts of Stan's bones added to complete the skeleton during mounting. It was loaned to the Nottingham Natural History Museum, Wollaton Hall, as the centrepiece to a temporary exhibition called Titus: T. rex is King. This was the first time a mounted T. rex skeleton containing fossil bones had been on display in England for many decades. Importantly, before the mounting process began, all the real bones were 3D scanned in detail using photogrammetry. The resulting digital 3D models were sent to palaeontologists in America who studied them and produced a paper describing the palaeopathology before the mounting process was even complete. Replicas of all the identifiable bones were 3D printed for display in the exhibition and were accessioned into the museum collections, along with the 3D digital models and all associated data. This ensured that physical as well as digital replicas of the bones would remain accessible, and in theory publishable, forevermore.