T REX Jane

[Madame Butterfly 0]

Museum hopes T. rex 'Jane' will attract dino fans

 

Friday, July 22, 2005; Posted: 9:45 a.m. EDT (13:45 GMT)

 

 

 

 

 

"Jane," an unusually complete skeleton of a juvenile Tyrannosaurus rex, is on view at the Burpee Museum of Natural History in Rockford -- about 100 miles northwest of more famous T. rex sibling Sue's Chicago home.

 

"It's kind of amazing that in the distance of 100 miles between Rockford and Chicago, we have the largest T. rex mounted skeleton in Sue and the smallest in Jane," said Burpee curator Michael Henderson. "We have the oldest T. rex specimen, in terms of years when it died, and we have the youngest here with Jane. I think she's a beautiful fossil."

 

Jane, just 11 years old when she died, lives in a $1.3 million exhibit built exclusively for her 21-foot-long fossilized skeleton. Rockford officials hope the 66-million-year-old fossil will put their tiny museum on the map.

 

"Jane may be a small dinosaur in a small museum, but she is a giant paleontological find. The world is going to come to this doorstep," said Peter Larson, the founder of the Black Hills Institute for Geological Research in South Dakota.

 

Larson, who provided advice to the Burpee crew, helped excavate Sue, the largest and most complete T. rex fossil yet discovered.

 

Sue was named after the woman who discovered her; Jane after a Burpee Museum benefactor.

 

The Field Museum bought Sue at auction for $8.4 million in 1997. But Jane was discovered by a low-budget expedition of staff and volunteers from the Burpee Museum, searching for fossils in southeast Montana in 2001.

 

Time ran out before the team determined what a treasure they had found, and so they returned the next year. Soon, it became clear how well preserved and how complete (about 50 percent of Jane's bones have been found) the fossil was -- but the museum lacked the money to bring their world-class find back to Rockford.

 

So Burpee Museum president Lew Crampton got on the phone and raised $100,000 from community residents and businesses over five days. The exhibit -- called "Jane: Diary of a Dinosaur" -- received about $1 million in state funds and $350,000 in federal and private money.

 

Crampton hopes that the museum, which attracts about 100,000 visitors annually, will see attendance increase by 20 percent because of Jane. He's especially interested in residents of the Chicago suburbs, and travelers on their way to Wisconsin, but he's already had inquiries from tour groups in Germany, where there is a serious fascination with dinosaurs.

 

He also expects that dino fans who travel to Chicago to view Sue will want to take a gander at Jane as well.

 

It took three years of study and trips to view dinosaur bones at museums around the country before Henderson decided that Jane was a junior version of Sue, a juvenile T. rex.

 

Other paleontologists thought (and some still believe) that Jane could be a "pygmy" relative of T. rex, called Nanotyrannus lancensis.

 

But Henderson said tests that revealed Jane was 11 years old and still growing -- when she died convinced him that she was a juvenile version of the most fearsome dinosaur. She had yet to hit a growth spurt during which she would have gained five pounds a day, about a ton a year, and extended her height from 7 1/2 feet to about 12 feet, Henderson said.

 

In the exhibit, Jane is mounted in a pose to suggest she's about to attack a smaller, plant-eating dinosaur below her skull, and she's flashing the 17 curved, razor-sharp teeth in her lower jaw.

 

Elsewhere in the 2,000-square-foot space, visitors can watch an animated representation as the arid southeastern Montana of today transforms into a lush forest of 66 million years ago.

 

There is also a detailed timeline, interactive stations featuring colorful graphics and a re-creation of the rustic cabin that served as the base for the team that discovered Jane.

 

Scott Williams, now the museum's collections manager, was on that trip and calls the Burpee "the little museum that could."

 

"When you look at places like the American Museum (of Natural History) or the Smithsonian ... when they go get this kind of stuff, you kind of expect it. You expect them to get something great because they're a big museum, they have big budgets, they're well known, they have a good history of finding stuff.

 

"When something like this happens to Burpee -- there's people in Rockford who don't even know Burpee's here!" Williams said. "We did something that was pretty cool that you'd expect to see at the big museums."