The first known T-Rex skull - discovered by dinosaur hunter Barnum Brown in 1902 - must have been truly fearsome to behold, says writer and journalist David Randall.
"You have these serrated teeth that are as long as bananas, these jaws that are four feet long, and we now know that they exerted so much pressure that they essentially exploded the bones of whatever it was its prey."
In his new book The Monster's Bones, Randall unearths the human story behind our centuries-long search for dinosaur skeletons.
Tyrannosaurus rex bones. Photo: 123RF
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It was a 12-year-old English girl named Mary Anning who set off the craze for hunting down dinosaur bones back in the early 19th century, Randall tells Jesse Mulligan.
“It was the same year that Jane Austen published Sense and Sensibility. [Austen] lived about 100 miles away from Mary Anning, who discovered one of the first known dinosaur species amongst cliffs near her home.
“Because of this, [Mary Anning] had some of the wealthiest and most learned people in England come to her to hopefully see if she could find more.”
It was a flashpoint moment that set off a dinosaur bone rush, especially across the Atlantic.
“In the US, two professors, Cope and Marsh, had this idea that they wanted to go out and find as many bones as possible, not only for scientific purposes but also as kind of a grudge match, they wanted to do it just to kind of stick it to the other person.
“They found some of the classic dinosaurs; the brontosaurus, and some of those that are very familiar to anybody who just has a passing familiarity with palaeontology.”
In the US, dinosaur bones and fossils were abundant yet in hard-to-get-to places so successfully hunting for them was a novelty, Randall says.
"It almost felt like a mission to the moon, if you're going into somewhere like Wyoming or Montana at this time.
“Some of the first the big dinosaurs that we think of the Stegosaurus, the first one that somebody found they actually thought it was an escaped steer they saw the horn sticking out from behind a rock and somebody lassoed it and started dragging it.”
Illustration of a herd of triceratops dinosaurs. The creatures were common in the late Cretaceous period. Photo: AFP
Barnum Brown, the Kansas dinosaur hunter who discovered the first T-rex, is regarded as a legend in palaeontology, Randall says.
“As a child, [Brown] started finding seashells in the soil of their farm. And he started to wonder why, when they were 600 miles away from the nearest ocean, how are there seashells here? And that's what got him started in science.
“He started realising there's a larger world out there. And he started demonstrating this innate ability to find fossils and find bones.”
Brown had many qualities that marked him as a great palaeontologist, Randall says.
“You had to be really good at geology, to understand the history of what you were looking at, you also had to be really physically strong to go out there and use your brute force to uncover these bones.
“And you also have to be incredibly patient, going out into the field under brutal conditions. And almost every time you are out there, it ends and failure, it's only rarely that you find something, it's that combination is rare.”
Brown was also running from sadness - his wife had died suddenly and fieldwork was an escape, Randall says.
“He couldn't handle the modern world. So, he dove back into the prehistoric."
The Monster's Bones by David K Randall Photo: WW Norton
Brown discovered the first-ever T-Rex in a rocky part of Montana aptly named Hell's Creek, Randall says.
“The conditions alone are awful. [Hell's Creek] is one of those places where the sun is beating down on you, and there's so much dust that you feel like you're choking if you don't have a bandana over your face, it gets so hot and then suddenly, you're gonna have a thunderstorm with hail and maybe a tornado. It's a place that’s almost trying to tell humans stay out.”
At the time, esteemed paleontologist Henry Fairfield Osbourne wanted a special drawcard for the new American Museum of Natural History of which he was president.
“[Osbourne] felt like the other museums were pushing farther ahead than the American Museum. And after the Carnegie Museum found this great diplodocus... It's actually in the British Museum of Natural History, it's the famous ‘Dippy’... that was the push Osbourne had to tell Brown 'everybody's ahead of us and essentially it’s your fault, you need to make this right, we need to catch up'.
“So he sent Brown to Montana. They didn't know the T-Rex was going to be there. He just said 'find something' and that was in 1902.”
As a result, Brown became the first human to ever lay eyes on the silhouette of a T-Rex, Randall says.
“He was so scared of, essentially, the museum saying 'we don't want you anymore, and you're gonna have to go back to Kansas and be a farmer'.
“That seemed like the worst, that seemed like a death sentence to him. So, he was there in Montana, and he saw this sandstone hill and he thought 'there's got to be something under there'. And he attacked it with dynamite. And lo and behold, there it was.”
The T-Rex skull must have been a fearsome thing to behold, he says.
"In the book, I describe it as if it's a child's nightmare come real and laid into stone. You have these serrated teeth that are as long as bananas, these jaws that are four feet long, and we now know that they exerted so much pressure that they essentially exploded the bones of whatever it was its prey.
“It had these hips that were 13 feet high and they could they could sprint at speeds of 20 miles per hour or more, you had this essentially perfect killing machine.”
The T-rex discovery brought dinosaurs into the mainstream but its unveiling in 1915 triggered an existential crisis for many people.
“You have this creature that seemed like it would have no natural enemies and would clearly destroy us if it was still alive.
“How could something like this go extinct? And what does that mean for humans? If something like this lived and once died, we also seem to be pretty powerful does that mean that we're going to one day die out and go extinct?”
This was before the hypothesis that an asteroid had crashed into Earth and led to dinosaurs’ extinction, he says.
“There was a blank spot and scientists filled it in with prejudice. They said perhaps it just wasn't smart enough. And therefore, they made that leap to eugenics to say, well, we don't want the human species to die out. So we need to have plans in place that only have only a select number of people can breed.”
In the US, this school of thought very quickly became entwined with ideas of racial supremacy, Randall says, but nevertheless, the T-Rex quickly became part of popular culture.
“It was the first dinosaur that really made that leap. And it was very quickly the first [dinosaur] villain in popular movies such as The Lost World (1925) and King Kong (1933).
“T-Rex is one of the first bad guys. That gave people a reason to go to movies, it gave them the sense of spectacle.”
Now children wear dinosaur pyjamas and play with dinosaur toys, Randall says.
“Which is strange when you're talking about a creature that last lived 66 million years ago.”