A T. Rex Named Sue

The University of Texas has a Panamerican campus near us in the city of Edinburg, Texas. We stopped by this afternoon to see their replica of the skeleton of a Tyrannosaurus Rex named Sue. Sue is impressive! When we went into the room where Sue has been put, her open mouth was pointed right at us. Reminded us of a scene from the movie Jurassic Park.










This is an almost complete skeleton from the western United States. The real skeleton is owned and displayed by the Field Museum of Chicago. Apparently several replicas have been made for display in other places, and one of the traveling replicas is here in Edinburg.
















Lee checks out a display of the skull.












Along one side of the room are some display panels with information and hands-on displays dealing with some of what is known about the T. Rex--like how its neck vertebrae move to allow it to pull its head back toward its body to maintain its balance.


The university was also showing a video about dinosaurs in its planetarium. The half-hour show covered a lot of interesting information that was new to us--like the fact that an area of the western states has an orange layer of rock that divides rock with dinosaur fossils from rock in which dinosaurs fossils are not found. Below this layer--lots of dinosaurs, above the layer--no dinosaurs. The source of this orange layer isn't known for sure. One possibility is that it's debris thrown into the atmosphere by the massive meteor often spoken of as hitting the earth 65 million years ago.