Scotty: Canada's home-grown Tyrannosaurus rex is ...

A much-celebrated T. rex is a Saskatchewan local

If you are looking for more details, kindly visit Dino walk.

Graham Duggan

In the Nature of Things documentary The Real T. rex, we discover what T. rex was really like, a fearsome predator with ginger eyebrows and an ominous rumble.

T. rex&#;s bones have been found all over the world, including here in Canada. During the Cretaceous period, when T. rex lived, Canada was covered with a tropical forest and had an inland sea that stretched from coast to coast. Today, our prairies are a treasure trove of dinosaur fossils.

Photo: Royal Saskatchewan Museum

In August , Robert Gebhard, a school teacher from Eastend, Saskatchewan joined a team of paleontologists on a local expedition and stumbled across one of the biggest fossil finds in Canadian history.  They found the first T. rex skeleton ever discovered in Saskatchewan.

Three years later, Tim Tokaryk from the Royal Saskatchewan Museum began the five-year excavation. It caused a lot of excitement in the small town of Eastend &#; over 6,000 people visited the site during the first year of work!

MORE:
Everything we know about T. rex is wrong
The fierce T. rex hunted in female-led packs

The museum&#;s paleontologists recovered 65-70% of the full skeleton &#; now confirmed as the world's biggest T. rex ever found! Standing a whopping six metres tall and 12 metres long, the local dino was named Scotty after the lead scientist purchased an expensive bottle of scotch whiskey to celebrate the find.

Since finding Scotty, the museum has learned a lot from the bones.  Research suggests that Scotty could be the heaviest T. rex ever discovered &#; one leg bone weighed in at 90 kilograms! Researchers believe Scotty was over 28-years-old when it died, older than any other T. rex specimen.

And clues from the size and shape of its bones suggest that Scotty was actually a female!

A T. rex coprolite (Photo: Royal Saskatchewan Museum)

Paleontologists also made another amazing discovery alongside her &#; the only known T. rex &#;coprolite&#; in the world &#; a 65-million-year-old poo.

The fossilized dung tells us what T. rex ate and proved that they had a taste for herbivorous dinosaurs like stegosaurus or triceratops.

The museum created a life-size replica of Scotty that lives in Eastend&#;s T. rex Discovery Centre where she towers over visitors, just a short distance from where she laid for 65 million years.

Scotty is also Saskatchewan&#;s official fossil, chosen by fans who voted in the province&#;s Fossil Campaign.

T. rex is the most well-known dinosaur to have ever existed.  And now Canadians can meet a home-grown T. rex in their backyard &#; one who has called Canada home for 65 million years.

Watch The Real T. rex on CBC's The Nature of Things with David Suzuki.

Send this page to someone via

For many years now, Saskatchewan has been the proud home of the world&#;s largest Tyrannosaurus rex.

Nicknamed Scotty, this once huge animal used to roam the earth some 66 million years ago. Weighing an estimated 19,555 pounds, the equivalent of four pickup trucks, and measuring nearly 42 feet long.

Scotty took more than two decades to fully excavate and analyze and was named the largest member of its species ever found, as well as the longest-lived T. rex, according to the fossil record.

A new study, however, suggests Scotty might not hold those titles for much longer.

Paleontologists from the Canadian Museum of Nature in Ottawa have estimated the largest T. rex may have actually weighed roughly 33,000 pounds, making it heavier than an average school bus, which weighs about 24,000 pounds.

Story continues below advertisement

Want more information on T Rex Ride? Feel free to contact us.

Researchers were attempting to answer the question: How big could a Tyrannosaurus rex actually get?

Scientists first examined the fossil record, which shows that approximately 2.5 billion T. rexes once roamed the earth. However, only 32 adult fossils have ever been found, giving scientists a limited amount of data to research.

Get daily National news

Get the day's top news, political, economic, and current affairs headlines, delivered to your inbox once a day.

By providing your address, you have read and agree to Global News' Terms and Conditions and Privacy Policy

Co-authors David Hone and Jordan Mallon created two models of what varying body types of T. rexes could look like based off sexual dimorphism.

Using this data, the scientists were able to model T. rex&#;s growth curve throughout its lifetime &#; and estimate how big an adult might have grown.

If proven true in the future, this makes Scotty roughly 70 per cent smaller than what could be the largest of his species.

Story continues below advertisement

The scientists presented their findings on Nov. 5 at the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology&#;s annual conference in Toronto.

For those at the Royal Saskatchewan Museum, which Scotty calls home, the research is interesting, but for now he maintains the title of the largest T. rex ever discovered.

&#;It&#;s one of those weird situations where it isn&#;t really based on a specimen,&#; said Ryan McKellar, the curator of paleontology at the Royal Saskatchewan Museum. &#;It&#;s more of a hypothetical idea.

&#;There was a conference talk a few weeks ago where people suggested that if a T. rex kept growing and growing, potentially they could reach sizes that were bigger than Scotty. But right now, Scotty is still the biggest known specimen. So it&#;s more of a difference between the hypothetical growth curve and what we actually have for fossil material.&#;

And while Scotty is the biggest for now, McKellar is excited for the future and what might be uncovered.

&#;Part of what makes hunting for additional specimens down the road more exciting is that there could be bigger, better-preserved material in Saskatchewan and in the northern United States,&#; he said.

Story continues below advertisement