A dinosaur skeleton in a museum with people looking at it

Photo by Tofan Teodor on Unsplash

Scans Show Largest T. Rex Died After Fight

scienceSep 7, 2026·298 words·3 min read

Scientists say they now know how the largest Tyrannosaurus rex ever found died. The dinosaur, nicknamed Scotty, lived about 66 million years ago. Its skeleton was dug up in 1991 in Saskatchewan, in western Canada. Scotty was around 43 feet long and weighed about 19,500 pounds, as much as two elephants. A research team used a special scanning method at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), a science centre in Tennessee.

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.

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