After 66 million years, a T. rex makes its grand debut

For five years, The Washington Post’s Lee Powell has documented the journey of a nearly complete T. rex skeleton from the remote reaches of Montana to smalltown Canada to the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C. The roughly 66millionyearold dinosaur was discovered during a hike in 1988 by Kathy Wankel, who was with her family in eastern Montana. “I think I found a megafind,” Wankel says. The T. rex ended up on display, in a lyingdown pose, at the Museum of the Rockies in Bozeman, Mont. Eventually, the fossils were taken off display in preparation for a crosscountry trip and a bigger stage. The journey of the T. rex included a stop in Trenton, Ontario, where a company built the steel mount that will display the bones for Smithsonian visitors to see. Because the skeleton was found on U.S. Army Corps of Engineers land, it belongs to the American people. The dinosaur is the centerpiece of the Smithsonian’s renovated fossil hall, which is more than a hundred years old. It sees some 5 to 7 million visitors a year, making the hall one of the most visited spaces of its kind in the world. This is the story of how the "the nation's T. rex” came to Washington. Subscribe to The Washington Post on YouTube