What's in a Name? Tyrannosaurus rex

Tyrannosaurus rex (Part 1)

One of the most popular dinosaurs to ever be discovered is Tyrannosaurus rex. A list of discoveries of T. rex specimens has been published in a book. The list includes significant T. rex finds from historic to completeness. A lot of parts and pieces are found for T. rex but most aren’t considered significant. We find numerous teeth but they won’t make the list of specimens. So, what does it take to make the list?

History

In the late 1800s and early 1900s there weren’t many dinosaurs known so everything was considered significant for the study of dinosaurs. As more complete fossils were found, individual bones and teeth that were found were not considered as significant because there was already enough known information available about most or all of the individual parts that were being found. Some of those earliest pieces are still considered important now more for their history than their science.

The earliest T. rex specimens were dug by Barnum Brown in the early 1900s for the American Museum of Natural History. He is credited with discovering and digging 5 T. rexes (though 2 were just based of several bones). In 1902 and 1905 he dug out 2 and in 1908 he dug up what would be the best T. rex skeleton of that time.

Naming – What Might Have Been

Henry Osborn, from the American Museum of Natural History, formally named Tyrannosaurus rex in 1905. There are a set of guidelines that must be followed in order for a scientific name to be valid. One rule is, “He who names it first has priority over any other names given to a specimen”. It doesn’t sound like that should be a problem but it sure has been and it could have been for T. rex.

There were lots of things collected that were totally unknown so the unknown things were stored for a later date. Some things were known but they were not correlated to any other known materials so some of the information was lost until later. Some things are put to print quickly so that no one else can claim the rights to naming something and whichever name reaches print first will have priority. What do these things have to do with T. rex?

Recently, a bone was found in a museum that was identified as a T. rex bone. Because it was an unknown bone it was stored away for future reference. That was in 1874.

Edward Drinker Cope described two very fragmented neck vertebrae and named the dinosaur Manospondylus gigas in 1892. It was not clear that these vertebrae were from a T. rex until the year 2000 when that dig site was revisited and more bones were found.

In 1905 when Osborn named T. rex in his paper, he also named the other specimen from 1902 that Brown had collected as Dynamosaurus imperiosus. Had these pages been printed early in the paper, this would have become the official name for the T. rex but the paper started off with the T. rex specimen so that is the name that is and has been used.

Naming rule changes in 2000 allowed Tyrannosaurus rex to remain the official name.

To be continued….