Scans Reveal Largest T. Rex Died After Fight

The conclusion rests on an exceptionally rare piece of evidence. Fossilised bone is common; preserved soft tissue is not, because organic material normally disintegrates long before palaeontologists can study it. Scotty's rib, however, retained mineralised remnants of the tissue that once surrounded it. Since such material is extremely fragile, the researchers needed a way to look inside the fossil without cutting or otherwise damaging it, and turned to neutron imaging, a technique that passes neutrons through an object to map its internal structure. The scans produced detailed three-dimensional reconstructions that could be examined at a microscopic scale. Mauricio Barbi, a physicist at the University of Regina in Saskatchewan, called the find "like winning the lottery", noting that the rib holds a vast network of mineralised blood vessels of a kind never previously observed in a fossil.

Those vessels also supplied the decisive clue. After the rib cracked, new blood vessels had begun to form around the break, the body's normal response to a serious fracture. That healing was never completed, which suggests the dinosaur died soon afterwards, in what was then a salt marsh. Jerit Mitchell, a doctoral candidate in physics at Regina who leads the project under Barbi's supervision, argued that many museum collections hold fossils whose stories remain untold, and that methods such as neutron imaging could finally unlock them. The team now hopes to apply the approach to other specimens, in the expectation that similar examinations will reveal more about how prehistoric animals lived and died.