The T.rex Discovery Centre is a

natural history museum A natural history museum or museum of natural history is a scientific institution with natural history collections that include current and historical records of animals, plants, fungi, ecosystems, geology, paleontology, climatology, and more. ...

located in

Eastend, Saskatchewan Eastend is a town A town is a human settlement. Towns are generally larger than villages and smaller than cities, though the criteria to distinguish between them vary considerably in different parts of the world. Origin and use The ...

Canada Canada is a country in North America. Its ten provinces and three territories extend from the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific Ocean and northward into the Arctic Ocean, covering over , making it the world's second-largest country by tot ...

, and housed in a building designed by

Stantec Stantec Inc. is an international professional services company in the design and consulting industry. The company was founded in 1954, as ''D. R. Stanley Associates'' in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada. Stantec provides professional consulting servi ...

. The T.rex Discovery Centre was opened to the public in 2001, and was intended house a number of fossils, including the remains of a ''

Tyrannosaurus ''Tyrannosaurus'' is a genus of large theropoda, theropod dinosaur. The species ''Tyrannosaurus rex'' (''rex'' meaning "king" in Latin), often called ''T. rex'' or colloquially ''T-Rex'', is one of the best represented theropods. ''Tyrannosa ...

'' nicknamed " Scotty" which was found nearby in 1991. Management of the T.rex Discovery Centre was assumed by the

Royal Saskatchewan Museum The Royal Saskatchewan Museum (RSM) is a Canadian natural history museum in Regina, Saskatchewan. Founded in 1906, it is the first museum in Saskatchewan, and the first provincial museum in the three Prairie Provinces. The institution was formed ...

in 2013.

History

The idea for a world-class facility to house the fossil record of southwest Saskatchewan began in 1988. Through a series of public meetings, the Town of

identified a need for a palaeontological centre to showcase the rich fossil record of the Frenchman River Valley and the Cypress Hills. The T.rex Discovery Centre opened in 2001 in the Frenchman River Valley, about 25 km southeast of Eastend. On February 14, 2013 the

assumed operations of the T.rex Discovery Centre.

Galleries

Cretaceous Gallery

This gallery explores the geologic sediments deposited to create the

Bearpaw Formation The Bearpaw Formation, also called the Bearpaw Shale, is a geologic formation of Late Cretaceous (Campanian) age. It outcrops in the U.S. state of Montana, as well as the Canadian provinces of Alberta and Saskatchewan, and was named for the Bear P ...

and the

Frenchman Formation The Frenchman Formation is stratigraphic unit of Late Cretaceous (late Maastrichtian) age in the Western Canada Sedimentary Basin. It is present in southern Saskatchewan and the Cypress Hills of southeastern Alberta. The formation was defined by ...

and the fossils within. This includes invertebrates from the Bearpaw Formation such as

ammonite Ammonoids are a group of extinct marine mollusc animals in the subclass Ammonoidea of the class Cephalopoda. These molluscs, commonly referred to as ammonites, are more closely related to living coleoids (i.e., octopuses, squid and cuttlefish) ...

and

baculite ''Baculites'' ("walking stick rock") is an extinct genus of cephalopods with a nearly straight shell, included in the heteromorph ammonites. The genus, which lived worldwide throughout most of the Late Cretaceous, and which briefly survived the ...

, fish, shark, turtles and marine reptiles and fossils from the Frenchman Formation including ''Tyrannosaurus rex'', ''

Triceratops ''Triceratops'' ( ; ) is a genus of herbivore, herbivorous Chasmosaurinae, chasmosaurine Ceratopsidae, ceratopsid dinosaur that first appeared during the late Maastrichtian stage of the Late Cretaceous Period (geology), period, about 68 m ...

'' and ''Hadrosaurus''.

Cenozoic Gallery

Some species of mammals, birds and fish survived the K-Pg extinction event. The

Ravenscrag Formation The Ravenscrag Formation is a stratigraphic unit of early Paleocene age in the Western Canada Sedimentary Basin. It was named for the settlement of Ravenscrag, Saskatchewan, and was first described from outcrops at Ravenscrag Butte near the Frenc ...

is where these fossils were deposited and the gallery examines these creatures from Saskatchewan's prehistoric landscape. On display are reptiles such ''

Borealosuchus ''Borealosuchus'' (meaning "boreal crocodile") is an extinct genus of crocodyliforms that lived from the Late Cretaceous to the Eocene in North America. It was named by Chris Brochu in 1997 for several species that had been assigned to ''Leidyos ...

'' and ''

Champsosaurus ''Champsosaurus'' is an extinct genus of crocodile-like choristodere reptile, known from the Late Cretaceous and early Paleogene periods of North America and Europe (Campanian-Paleocene). The name ''Champsosaurus'' is thought to come from , () sa ...

'' as well as a life-size cast of the mammal ''Brontothere''.

Fossil Research Station

Museum palaeontologists work year-round in the station to conduct research on fossils collected over the summer field season.

Scotty the ''T. rex''

Originally discovered by Royal Saskatchewan Museum research team in Saskatchewan's Frenchman River Valley on August 16, 1991, the fossilized remains of specimen SM P2523.8 nicknamed Scotty, were painstakingly removed – almost completely by hand – over two decades from the rock in which they were embedded. When the preparation was complete in 2011, a 65% complete ''

Tyrannosaurus rex ''Tyrannosaurus'' is a genus of large theropod dinosaur. The species ''Tyrannosaurus rex'' (''rex'' meaning "king" in Latin), often called ''T. rex'' or colloquially ''T-Rex'', is one of the best represented theropods. ''Tyrannosaurus'' live ...

'' skeleton was revealed. "Scotty" the ''T. rex'' was found on August 16, 1991, by local high school principal Robert Gebhardt. Gebhardt had joined palaeontologists Tim Tokaryk and John Storer from the Royal Saskatchewan Museum (RSM) on a prospecting expedition alongside the

Frenchman River The Frenchman River, ( ats, níhʔɔɔtóóúníícááh, lit=white person river), also known locally as the Whitemud River, is a river in Saskatchewan, Canada and Montana, United States. It is a tributary of the Milk River, itself a tributary o ...

Valley. Gebhardt stumbled across a tail vertebra of the ''T. rex'' on a cattle trail he was walking along. They later found a piece of the jaw with teeth still attached sticking out of the side of a hill. Today, about 65% of Scotty's bones have been recovered. A cast of Scotty was first to go on display at the T.rex Discovery Centre on March 15, 2013, followed by a second in an exhibit developed by the

Australian Museum The Australian Museum is a heritage-listed museum at 1 William Street, Sydney central business district, New South Wales, Australia. It is the oldest museum in Australia,Design 5, 2016, p.1 and the fifth oldest natural history museum in the ...

in November 2013. On March 21, 2019, Scotty was described to be the largest and oldest ''T. rex'' in the world, with an estimated weight of 8870 kg, length of 13.2 m and age of over 30 years. The previous owner of the 'longest lived ''T. rex title was Sue, who lived to be 28. On May 17, 2019, a cast of Scotty was unveiled at the Royal Saskatchewan Museum.

References

External links

* {{authority control Museums in Saskatchewan Dinosaur museums Natural history museums in Canada