The Tyrannosaurus Rex

The name Tyrannosaurus rex was attached to a skeleton pulled out of the badlands of eastern Montana.

The fossil hunter Barnum Brown found a first partial skeleton in eastern Wyoming in 1900. Two years later he found another in the Hell Creek Formation of Montana, and in 1905 Henry Fairfield Osborn named that second skeleton Tyrannosaurus rex, from the Greek for tyrant and lizard and the Latin for king.

The best-known specimen came much later. On August 12, 1990, Sue Hendrickson found a skeleton in the Hell Creek Formation of South Dakota that turned out to be about 85 percent complete and one of the largest ever found. Known simply as Sue, it measures about 40 to 42 feet long. The species lived from about 69 to 66 million years ago, among the last dinosaurs on Earth, and it had the strongest bite of any land animal known.

The poster shows the animal in its classic stance: big head raised, mouth slightly open with teeth showing, small forelimbs held against the chest, the heavy tail curving out behind. A lone flat-topped tree stands on the left and low mountains run along the horizon. Above sits the title in serif capitals with the Latin name in italics, and a short caption runs across the foot.