T. Rex with Well-Preserved Skull Found in Montana's Hell Creek Formation

By Richard Farrell, Discovery News | August 19, 2016 07:55am ET

There's a new Tyrannosaurus rex fossil on the block, with a cute nickname and about 20 percent of its former body intact, including a well-preserved skull.

The T. rex was found by paleontologists from Burke Museum and the University of Washington (UW) in Montana's famous dinosaur-fossil haven, the Hell Creek Formation. It has been dubbed the "Tufts-Love Rex," in honor of the volunteer paleontologists who first noticed bones jutting out of a hillside: Burke Museum's Jason Love and Luke Tufts.

The Burke and UW researchers say they were able to unearth roughly a fifth of the animal, including ribs, hips, jaw bones and vertebrae. (They'll search for more pieces of the iconic beast next summer.)

But the centerpiece of the find is the skull, which is about 4 feet long. So far, the scientists can see the right side of the skull -- from base to snout, including teeth -- and they think it's likely the left side, now trapped in rock, is intact too. (They'll begin the painstaking process of removing the remaining rock in October.)

The researchers estimate Tufts-Love lived about 66.3 million years ago, making its living toward the end of the Cretaceous Period, not geologically long before a mass extinction wiped out the dinosaurs. They also reckon, due to skull size, that the T. rex was 15 years old when it died, putting it about halfway through a typical T. rex lifespan.

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