‘Dueling Dinosaurs’: World’s 1st complete Tyrannosaurus rex, Triceratops, Raleigh bound

The story starts like an ancient murder mystery.

In 2006, a Montana rancher and amateur fossil-hunter went out to comb the dry hillsides of the Hell Creek Formation — some of the world’s richest territory for dinosaur bones. He’d found hundreds before, so many that he made up his own name for the fragments he considered useless: “Leaverite,” as in “Leave ‘er right there.”

Then one day, Clayton Phipps and some partners spotted a large bone jutting out of the sandstone, possibly belonging to a ceratopsian, the family that includes Triceratops.

They returned days later with a backhoe, and as they turned up more sand and rock, they discovered a claw that had no business on a triceratops. It looked much more like a theropod, possibly a small Tyrannosaurus rex.

What they knew for sure was they had two dinosaurs in the same hole, buried together for 67 million years. More incredible yet, they seemed to be fighting, locked in some prehistoric feud.

Now, after 14 years, the story takes on a new chapter as Raleigh prepares to unveil its new “Dueling Dinosaurs” exhibit, housed in the downtown N.C. Museum of Natural Sciences, considered one of the world’s greatest-ever fossil finds.

When the new exhibit breaks ground in May and unveils the pair of fossils a year later, the Triangle will see the world’s first complete Tyrannosaurus skeleton, still encased in sandstone as Phipps found it, detailed down to the individual foot bones, the shark-sized teeth and the claws still sharp enough to rip flesh.

Thousands of school field trips will pass by a Triceratops head the size of a calf, with scaly skin impressions still on its frill — also globally unique to the museum.

But in its most unusual twist, the museum will display its fossil prizes in a rare fashion that fits its education mission. The Dueling Dinosaurs are still locked inside their ancient rock prison, bones partially concealed. Researchers at the museum have yet to examine them in any detail.

For years to come, viewers will watch staff paleontologists do their work, slowly stripping away more of the sediment that surrounds the bones, being careful not to lose any soft-tissue remains still inside.

Visitors will pass through the SECU DinoLab, part of a $14 million project financed mostly with private dollars — an extension of the museum that will jut further out into Jones Street and allow museum-goers inside to approach and ask the working paleontologists questions without even a glass screen as a barrier.

“There’s such a gold mine of scientific information to be discovered,” said Eric Dorfman, museum director. “We already have a fantastic reputation for letting people see science unfold in real time. People can walk up and see researchers do the work they do. This fossil lets us take that idea with people engaging in science in real time to the next level.”

‘A big, exciting secret’

Buying the bones themselves cost $6 million, said Angela Baker-James, director of Friends of the Museum. All of that money came from private donations.

The rest of the museum’s price tag goes toward building the lab, creating an immersive prehistoric world around it, hiring new staff and preparing for outreach. Of that, the state provided $2 million and Wake County roughly $1 million through its “tourism tax” on hotel stays.

Raising that money is still about three-quarters complete, but reaching out to large corporate donors hasn’t been too challenging, said Baker-James, mentioning foundations at GlaxoSmithKline, Bank of America and Duke Energy.

“So many people love dinosaurs that it is an easy sell,” she said.

In October, a T. rex fossil nicknamed Stan sold for a record $31.8 million at private auction. But those bones have already undergone decades of research and are posed in a menacing stance, unlike Raleigh’s specimens, still largely unexamined and left largely as they were discovered.

Phipps put a hold on his fossils for the Raleigh museum after head paleontologist Lindsay Zanno made a pitch for a live-action research project, putting Raleigh’s dino-nerds in the front row. He reportedly liked the idea.

But even with the dinosaurs bought, the museum had to wait out a hard-fought legal battle over whose they were to sell — a court battle that hinged on the definition of fossil. Until the courts ruled, the sale wasn’t final.

When Phipps and his partners found the Dueling Dinosaurs, they had ranged onto a neighbor’s land. Mary Ann and Lige Murray had leased the land, then bought the surface rights, leaving the mineral rights to the original owner.

Once fossils worth millions began turning up, the original owners argued that fossils — found beneath the surface — technically belonged to them. This sparked years of depositions and counter-claims, including Phipps’ insight into the nature of fossil hunting:

“Even if I find a fossil sticking out of the ground, there is no reason to know that a complete skeleton, or usable portion of a skeleton, may be found with the bone fragment that is exposed,” he said in a 2015 deposition. “I have walked by literally truckloads of bone fragments which I regularly call “leaverite” which means, “leave ‘er right there, it’s worthless.” … Most of the fossils I have found over the years have little or no value and can be categorized as “leaverite,” “chunkosaur” or “junkosaur.”

In May, the Montana Supreme Court ruled in the Murrays’ favor. Mineral rights pertain to oil or gas that can be processed into something valuable, the court reasoned. Considering so many fossils have little commercial value, it ruled, fossils are not minerals.

But meanwhile, the museum sat waiting nearly five years for the courts to wrap up. All of that time, it was sitting on a scientific jewel in the crown, having to keep mum about the bones sitting behind closed doors.

“It was like having a big exciting secret,” said Baker-James. “What it was like was buying the perfect gift for somebody and having to see them every year, and wait for years until you can give it to them. ... It feels like 67 million years.”

The lawsuits never jeopardized ownership, she said. All they really decided is whom the museum would pay.

“It was a long wait,” Dorfman said. “This was five years already in the making.”

A murder mystery to make ‘a paleo team drool’

At roughly 9 feet tall, the Tyrannosaurus would have been a prehistoric teenager, said Zanno, the museum’s head paleontologist.

The animal lies curled into a ball with its head upside-down, its teeth jutting toward the ceiling. This is a common death pose for Tyrannosaurs, Zanno said, admiring its purple-black bones showing rust-colored strips of skin impressions.

“This is the hip here,” she said. “You have a leg folded up with a knee. This is an ankle. This entire beautiful section is the foot. They had incredibly long slender legs, so they were incredible runners, and then you’re looking at the belly around this side. Dinosaurs actually have ribs across the abdomen. Whether there are gut contents in here, whatever this animal’s last meal should be preserved, I don’t know whether we’ll find any evidence of that.”

Across the room in its own chunk of sandstone, the Triceratops skull grins at its modern surroundings. Its frill shows a gridlike pattern, which Zanno said would seem to settle the long-running debate about whether the animals had scales.

But little else is known, Zanno said. It’s not even certain the dinosaurs were fighting.

One clue is the T. rex teeth embedded in the Triceratops skeleton. Also intriguing are the cracks in the Tyrannosaurus skull, but the sediment around the bone is also cracked, so the damage might have come naturally or been triggered by a kick from a Triceratops hoof.

One scenario: the Triceratops was already dead when the T.rex found the carcass, and the meat-eater died in a fight with a different dinosaur.

Another possibility: a pack of young Tyrannosaurs stumbled on the dead triceratops, fed together and killed a weaker member to have a bigger portion. Many teeth were found at the site.

Whatever happened, they were buried together at the same time.

“This is a murder mystery 67 million years in the making,” said Zanno. “This is the kind of thing that makes a paleo team drool. It’s like a Christmas present sitting in this unopened package, and we get to open it with the public slowly, over time, and have those discoveries revealed.”

Both of the animals show signs of soft tissue, which looks to the untrained eye like the thin strips of skin left on a half-eaten rib bone. Preserving them, and the sediment around the bones, will be critical as the team works to reveal more of the dinosaurs.

“We have new chemical techniques and molecular techniques we use to extract ancient molecules from specimens,” Zanno said. “I’m not talking about DNA here. I’m talking about more resistant molecules like keratin that make up your fingernail or your hair.”

Some in the scientific community discredit any fossils unearthed by amateurs, having been excavated without carefully saving the data-rich sediment around it. But Zanno and her team have spent many weeks on the Hell Creek Formation, have met with Phipps at the site and studied the hole leftover. So far, she said, it looks like the dinosaurs fought in an ancient river environment.

“This is what makes this project so remarkable and fun,” said Zanno. “We know the public wants all the answers about these specimens and we want to give it to them. But we want them to go on this journey with us.”

Waiting for their Big Day

The public won’t get to see the fossils, which weigh a collective 15 tons, until the lab opens a year later. As yet, the dinosaurs have no names, unlike Dippy, Oskar or Stan in museums around the world.

In their sandstone graves, they look nothing like the fossils on display in other museums, crouching and posed for a fight like the Acrocanthosaurus famously inhabiting the windowed gallery on the Raleigh museum’s upper floor.

With a name like “Dueling Dinosaurs” — though that’s not official — the public might expect a more dramatic meeting with the prehistoric relics, especially their younger fans.

But Dorfman, museum director, has no worries. The Window on Animal Health, which shows live veterinarians performing real-time surgeries, is one of the museum’s most popular exhibits, and it represents the same hands-on approach to exhibits rather than a slick, polished production.

“When there’s a procedure happening,” he said, “you can’t get up to the window.”

It may be hard for Raleigh to wait a year past the groundbreaking before setting eyes on the horns and claws, and even longer to learn how its newest attraction met its underground end.

But the mystery has been unfolding since the Cretaceous age. It can stand a few more plot twists.

This story was originally published November 17, 2020 at 6:00 AM with the headline "‘Dueling Dinosaurs’: World’s 1st complete Tyrannosaurus rex, Triceratops, Raleigh bound."