Bone To Pick: First T. Rex Skeleton, Complete At Last

The backrooms of museums are like your grandparents' attic, only the stuff is more exotic — things like fossilized jellyfish, dinosaur eggs or mummified princes.

And if you look carefully, you'll find objects that once changed science but are now largely forgotten. You might call them Lost Treasures of Science. This is a story of one of those objects — a special bone that's part of a special skeleton.

We'll start with Carl Mehling. When he went to the last meeting of the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology in Pittsburgh, he was planning for a good time — first lectures, then party. But he had a nagging worry as well.

"Every moment of every day I had this monkey on my back," he says with a laugh. "A big monkey with short arms and two claws."

The monkey was actually a bone — a very valuable bone. It belonged to one of the world's most important skeletons, one that was discovered a century ago in a Montana hillside.

And carrying it around made Mehling nervous. "I didn't want to be the jackass that lost it," he says.

Barnum Brown, Fossil Hunter
The bone came out of a Montana hillside over 100 years ago, discovered by a man who was a legend among fossil hunters.

In the early 1900s, dinosaur bones were like Egyptian mummies — mysteries that dazzled both the public and scientists. Larry Witmer, paleontologist at Ohio University, says scientists clamored for bones and more bones.

"It was literally the Wild West at that time," says Witmer. "When people went out looking for dinosaurs, they were trophy hunters. They were looking for specimens they could mount in museums. They were headhunters looking for skulls, because they were flashier."

And Barnum Brown was among the best — the Indiana Jones of dino hunters. He was flamboyant; on dinosaur digs, he'd wear a full-length fur coat.

But he was a serious scientist, too. He held the top paleontology spot at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City, a job now held by Mark Norell.

Norell says Brown mixed his science with show business. "People would flock to his train when it arrived in stations across the country," says Norell. "He had a radio program each week, talking about dinosaurs and that kind of thing."

by Christopher Joyce
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http://www.npr.org/2011/09/14/140410442/bone-to-pick-first-t-rex-skeleton-complete-at-last