After a decade of prising the long-lived, then long-dead animal’s bones from the rock, the mighty mega-rex Scotty was named for the bottle they broke out to mark the event
He was 13 meters long, over twice as tall as you and weighed almost nine tons, back when he lived in Saskatchewan 66 million years ago. Despite his imposing bulk, he had clearly suffered in life – and was he fat?
Scotty, the biggest T-rex found to date, had injuries, whether from prey that resisted or fellow predators. Perhaps it was also predictable that, as the paleontologists put it, “There is considerable size variability among Tyrannosaurus. Some individuals were lankier than others and some were more robust. Scotty exemplifies the robust.”
His skeleton was found back in 1991, but extracting a tyrannosaurus from encasing rock using micro-tools is time-consuming. After a decade of painstakingly chipping away, one might assume the University of Alberta paleontologists nicknamed the mega-rex Scotty after their intrepid first author W. Scott Persons. But they did not. The dinosaur was named for a celebratory bottle of scotch the night he was discovered, the scientists explain in The Anatomical Record.
