Share to ClassroomScans Show Fight Killed Biggest T. Rex
Scientists now know how the largest Tyrannosaurus rex ever found died. The dinosaur is called Scotty. It lived about 66 million years ago. People found its skeleton in 1991 in Saskatchewan, in western Canada. Scotty was about 43 feet long and as heavy as two elephants. A team studied one of its ribs at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in the United States. They found that Scotty died after a fight with another dinosaur damaged this rib.
Usually only bones survive for millions of years. Soft body parts break down and disappear. But Scotty's rib still had hard traces of old tissue inside it. This material is very easy to damage. So the team used neutron imaging. This is a way to see inside an object without cutting it. The scans made clear 3D pictures of the rib. Mauricio Barbi, a scientist at the University of Regina, said the rib holds many hard blood vessels. Nobody had ever seen this in a fossil before.
These blood vessels explain the death. When the rib broke, new vessels began to grow around it. This is how a body repairs an injury. But the repair was not finished. So Scotty probably died soon after the fight. The team now wants to study other fossils in the same way.
