The Journey Museum, in partnership with the Black Hills Institute (BHI), is pleased to announce a special event to celebrate the unveiling of a new dinosaur skull on loan from BHI. The skull is from an Acrocanthosaurus atokensis (high-spined lizard from Atoka), which gets its name from the tall spines along its back. This giant theropod (meat-eating dinosaur) predated Tyrannosaurus rex by fifty million years.
The event will also include an appearance by BHI President Peter Larson, who will be signing copies of his new book Rex Appeal 2. The event will be on May 18th from 6-7 PM.
When Peter Larson’s team at the Black Hills Institute discovered the world’s two most complete, significant Tyrannosaurus rex skeletons, in 1990 and 1992, he knew they were the finds of a lifetime. But he had no way of foreseeing that “Sue” and “Stan” would plunge him down a rabbit hole‑into a topsy-turvy world of FBI agents, federal prosecutors, powerful museums, Native American tribes, competing paleontologists, and sibling rivalry.
Rex Appeal 2 tells Sue’s now-famous story, but this new second edition also features Stan—which soon revealed the best skull ever discovered in the species. Shorter than Sue by mere inches, and almost as complete, the gracile specimen was a champion in his own right. Beyond their scientific value, both skeletons also starred in precedent-setting legal dramas, more than twenty years apart. The resulting court battles forever changed the financial side of paleontology, ending in auctions that brought staggering bids at auction.
Today, Larson remains both the lightning rod for the controversies rocking paleontology and a voice of reason for safe and fair fossil collecting in the U.S. He and his staff are still hard at work, the most successful T. rex hunters in history.
