Dynamosaurus: the first T. rex

From Trib.com: Dynamosaurus: the first T. rex

Remember that scene in "Jurassic Park?" The one where the cars won't start, when ripples in a glass of water alert the passengers that something is coming?

Something big. Something with eyes as big as tea saucers and teeth strong enough to pop the tires.

Well, had two pages been reversed in a 106-year-old scientific paper, Tyrannosaurus rex wouldn't have been stalking those kids and scientists. Dynamosaurus imperiosus would have.

Let's go back to the beginning.

In the fall of 1900, near Seven Mile Creek in Weston County, legendary paleontologist Barnum Brown should have been packing up camp and shipping his fossil finds to the American Museum of Natural History in New York City. Instead, he kept digging. The museum wanted a Triceratops skull to razzle and dazzle a public hungry for dinosaurs.

Barnum did find bones that October -- seven ribs, three vertebrae, a limb bone, parts of a pelvis, a lower jaw, 40 bones in all. But they weren't from a Triceratops, according to "Barnum Brown: The Man Who Discovered Tyrannosaurus Rex" by Lowell Dingus and Mark A. Norell.

Barnum had found a large carnivore, something new to science. He wrote a letter to his boss, Henry Fairfield Osborn: "... Among the bones were the teeth of Hadrosaur, Palaeoniscus, the most numerous a species undetermined, scales of fish and small bones -- all evidences of the animal's last meal." Barnum dug until a blizzard in November chased away his horses and he spent five days tracking them down.

Two years later, Barnum went to Montana and discovered another large carnivore.

Osborn described both specimens in his 1905 paper, "Tyrannosaurus and Other Cretaceous Carnivorous Dinosaurs," in the Bulletin of the AMNH . He described the Montana specimen on page 262, naming it Tyrannosaurus rex. He described the Wyoming specimen on page 263, and, believing that the bones came from two different types of dinosaurs, named the Wyoming find Dynamosaurus imperiosus (imperial powerful lizard).

By 1906, Osborn was convinced that the specimens were synonymous -- that is, they were parts of the same type. Protocol says that whichever name appears first in scientific papers is the proper name.

That's why it was T. rex's footsteps crashing through the jungle, making the water tremble. And why Tyrannosaurus rex is probably the only full scientific name recognized by children who can't yet read.

In "Dinosaur Heresies," paleontologist and "Jurassic Park" consultant Dr. Robert Bakker writes that a name like "Tryannosaurus rex is just irresistible to the tongue."

Would it be as irresistible if we knew the beast as D. imperiosus? One more question: Who wants to talk about how T. rex didn't live in the Jurassic, but the Cretaceous?