Tyrannosaurus rex Trix back in Leiden museum

This 6 August 2019 Dutch video is about Tyrannosaurus rex Trix. Yesterday, she arrived back in the Naturalis museum after a two-year world tour. Today, the bones of the skeleton were put together again at the museum.

Translated from Dutch NOS TV today:

The Tyrannosaurus rex of the Naturalis museum in Leiden is home again. Trix, as she was baptized in 2016, made a trip to European cities in the last two years during the major renovation of Naturalis.

“She is home again“, palaeontologist Anne Schulp says with a smile about the 66 million-year-old skeleton. “It is fantastic, because it means that we can almost open again.” The most famous carnivorous dinosaur is expected to become a major crowd puller in the renewed Naturalis that will open at the end of this month.

In recent years, Trix has attracted more than a million visitors on a tour of cities such as Barcelona, ​​Paris and Lisbon. She returned home yesterday with two large trucks. There, a start was made immediately on reassembling the twelve-meter long and five-meter high skeleton. Because the T. rex was taken apart before the journey.

Montana

Trix was excavated in 2013 in the American state of Montana. Scientists managed to salvage a large part of the skeleton. Trix is ​​therefore one of the most complete skeletons of a T. rex ever found.

Despite the fact that Trix has been in the possession of Naturalis for a while, all kinds of investigations are still ongoing. For example, how the tail moved. “Because that tail has been preserved so beautifully, we can do a lot of research into it”, palaeontologist Schulp told Omroep West.

“In addition, we are also investigating the chemical composition of the tooth enamel. That can tell something about body temperature. We are puzzling about that with a lab in Frankfurt.”

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