World’s biggest T. rex to be unveiled at Royal Sask Museum

The world’s biggest Tyrannosaurus rex is standing tall in Regina.

Scotty will be unveiled at the Royal Saskatchewan Museum’s (RSM) #Massive2019 exhibit when doors open to the public at 9:30 a.m. Friday.

The T. rex roamed Saskatchewan approximately 66 million years ago in the Cretaceous period, weighing an estimated 19,400 pounds (8,800kg) and stretching as long as a bus.

In order to fit this massive dinosaur, the museum had to cut a hole through the floor. That created a new space where visitors can view Scotty from the ground as it towers above them, or from the second floor balcony.

Ryan McKellar, paleontologist and curator with the RSM, said the exhibit focuses on Scotty’s injuries, habitat and how Tyrannosaurs changed as they grew up.

“In addition to having the world’s biggest T. rex, Saskatchewan also has the smallest individual. It’s a little foot bone from a yearling,” said McKellar.

Visitors will also be able to view and even touch some of the injuries that tell the story of Scotty’s life. Those include wounds on the face that have pierced all the way through to sinus cavities in the skull, holes in the jaw that could be related to other T. rex biting the face and a wound in the tail that may have affected how it moved.

Scotty’s arrival in Regina caught the eye of CBS’s This Morning show on Wednesday, and McKellar said the national media attention in the U.S. hit somewhere between 10 and 18 million viewers.

Scotty was discovered in the Frenchman River Valley near Eastend in 1991 and took decades of work until it was revealed as a mounted specimen at the T. rex Discovery Centre.