-Tyrannosaurus rex is the iconic dinosaur.
It's the iconic dinosaur.
-Everyone loves a dinosaur, you know.
-It's always been an anomaly
that the Smithsonian didn't have a Tyrannosaurus rex.
-Want me to get rid of it?
-I said, "Ah, I think I found a mega find, a mega find"!
-It's probably one of the most interesting mounts
we've ever done.
-I don't think a human had ever seen those bones before.
-Over all these years, still,
one of the very best T rex skeletons ever found.
-Our family was camped at Fort Peck,
which is a dam and a reservoir in Eastern Montana.
It was Labor Day weekend of 1988.
What we found was about this much sticking out of the bank.
And we dug around a little bit.
We were just looking for pieces of fossils.
We never dreamed we'd find the entire thing.
The bones stayed in our house, in our basement,
'til we could bring them to Bozeman.
That would've been Thanksgiving of 1988.
Pat Leiggi, I'm sure they have a lotta people that bring cow
bones and buffalo bones, so he was kinda ho-hum.
It was dark out, I believe,
and I remember great, big snowflakes falling
and he came out to our station wagon,
took one look, and his eyes got huge.
-We were pretty excited. We stood out there a long time.
All afternoon and the next day, piecing it together.
'Cause, like I said, it was fragmented.
-I mean, there was only one thing it could be:
It was the arm of a T rex.
-The ulna bone had never been found before on a T rex,
so they were very excited.
Wanted to know if we could find the spot and show them the spot.
-If we find three or more bones at a site,
the likelihood of it being a skeleton is extremely high.
-We've done a lotta research on this specimen.
We have determined that it was 18 years old when it died.
It, unfortunately, died violently.
We know that it was probably killed by some other animal.
-This was actually on display at our museum,
the Museum of the Rockies,
in the same pose that we found it in.
And, when the discussions came up about transferring it
to Washington for their new hall,
the Smithsonian's hall,
we decided to take it off display
and the best way to stabilize it
and keep it stable is to pack it in crates like this.
Ooh! Ooh.
Okay.
These are heavy objects and they're very fragile.
Nice and easy.
-This T rex is actually owned by the people of the US,
so it really is the Nation's T rex.
-I think something like 7 million people
from around the world will be able to view
this dinosaur in Washington, DC at the Smithsonian,
so, I mean, you can't help but be proud about that.
but, um.
I'm getting choked up.
-Why? -I don't know.
It's a big day.
-Bye! -What could be more fabulous
than welcoming a Tyrannosaurus rex to Washington, DC?
We're unveiling what is called MOR 555,
also known as the Wankel rex.
Also known as the Nation's T rex.
The rex will be part of our renovation
a renovation of our fossil halls,
our dinosaur halls, which opened to the public in 1911,
over 100 years ago.
We will dismantle the dinosaurs and other skeletons in the wing.
We will begin conserving them.
We'll then take that room back to its bare,
original architecture.
That hall will open in 2019.
-It's a huge number of people here.
A decade, at 5 million people,
it's 50 million, 60 million people,
will see this exhibit. That's, what?
That's 15% of the nation's population will be in this room.
Arguably, this room is one of the most impactful
science education spaces on the planet.
Although, we've disappointed a lot of people
because we took dinosaurs away from kids,
but, we'll be bringing them back with vigor.
Today, we loaded a Tyrannosaurus rex into a FedEx truck
and sending it up north to Canada,
where we're gonna be putting actual mounts on it.
So these are separate bones.
We're gonna build the steel framework
to mount this dinosaur in the national museum.
-Build dinosaurs.
And it stops 'em dead in their tracks.
"What do you mean, build dinosaurs"?
-We've got the bend going up nicely.
-We were basically raising the tail five inches,
so we bent the structural steel and the reason why we did
that was to keep it out of the reach of the public.
-Steelworkers, blacksmiths.
We have a lot of sculptors.
You know, we have artists, like a lot have an art background.
We have conservators, preparators.
Mold-makers.
It's a huge feather in our cap, you know, like just to do this
and, you know, especially after a career of doing it
and working with major museums throughout the world.
-This is gonna come down.
-So what we're thinking is release the tension on the tail
and make it go more like this, more in a straight line.
It's incredibly complicated and requires
a number of different disciplines and expertise
to put together and exhibit and we work on it for years,
assembling all of these different elements
and, when you walk in the hall,
all of that is invisible to you, as a visitor.
-In this particular project, the biggest challenge
probably has been the interaction of the two animals.
A T rex standing over a triceratops.
It's basically right on top of it.
Trying to get the two skulls to line up,
plus all of the other elements,
and make it work was challenging,
in the fact that it's just so much going on.
The armature that holds the real fossil,
which we call the fossil holder,
has, some people call them antlers, fingers,
whatever you wanna call them.
But it usually consists of a piece of half-round
with pieces that are tapered
and they follow the contour of the bone very closely.
It's got a high percentage of real fossil,
but where you see the white areas,
those are generally cast materials
that have been supplemented in.
The ribs, there's white.
Then, of course, all the cracks.
-This skull will be a cast.
The skull is the one part
that's probably of greatest scientific interest,
and so we wanna make that accessible to scientific study
and, if we position it like this,
it's really gonna make it impossible
for scientists to get at it.
Also, the precariousness of the way this mount is,
with the skull really hanging off the neck,
as it is on a live animal,
is not well-suited to mounting a real bone.
I think, you know, even if you're someone
who has the privilege to be a paleontologist
working at a museum and working on dinosaurs,
it is really once in your entire career
that you might get to do something like this.
-You could lose it tooth and have the tooth be busted off.
-Have the tooth be embedded in the [indistinct]?
-Yeah, so if like this one's missing,
you can have it in here, you know?
-If we do it like this, little bit here.
-Something that we all hope is gonna be around
for 50 or another 100 years and,
so, it's gonna outlast all of us.
-It's just too heavy to really manhandle.
We're gonna grab.
We're gonna grab here and here.
Any movement on the top.
That's stressed right here, right?
Give 'er a wiggle.
Oh.
-You can have that.
-It is beautiful. -You brought it once.
-I can have it back.
-Now, you can have it back. -Alright.
I think I had a bright orange sweatshirt,
but I've got kind of an orange one.
We'll wrap the T rex back up.
-Yeah. -Take 'im back out
into the dry creek country where we discovered
'im in 1988.
They're goin' back home. This is a replica.
This is not the original.
There it is.