Trix

Trix is a Tyrannosaurus rex specimen excavated in 2013 in Montana, United States by a team of paleontologists from the Naturalis Biodiversity Center in Leiden, the Netherlands and Black Hills institute of Geological Research in South Dakota. This Tyrannosaurus, over thirty years old the oldest known Tyrannosaurus specimen lived about 67 million years ago. It is considered to be the third most complete Tyrannosaurus found, with between 78% and 80% of its bone volume recovered. The specimen was named Trix after the former Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands. It is one of only two Tyrannosaurus specimens on permanent exhibit in mainland Europe. The other one is a specimen named Tristan on exhibit at the Natural History Museum of Berlin. At Naturalis, Trix has the accession or inventory number "RGM 792.000" in which "RGM" refers to the Rijksmuseum van Geologie en Mineralogie, one of the former museums that merged to form the constituent parts of Naturalis. Discovery In 2012, Naturalis Biodiversity Center at Leiden, the largest natural history museum of the Netherlands, planned to open a new exhibition hall in 2017. In order to increase the structural number of visitors from 300,000 to 400,000 per annum, the management decided to try and procure an authentic Tyrannosaurus skeleton, preferably one excavated by the museum itself. In September 2012, a museum delegation travelled to the US to contact the Black Hills Institute, a company that had been involved in nine Tyrannosaurus excavations. As it happened, the BHI had just received a report from a farmer in Wyoming about a Tyrannosaurus discovery. Senior Naturalis paleontologist John Vos immediately visited the site and identified the remains as those of Tyrannosaurus. As it was late in the season, it was decided to postpone the excavation until the next Spring. In April and May 2013, the site was thoroughly excavated, but apart from some foot bones, a skeleton proved to be absent. However, five Triceratops skeletons were present elsewhere on the farm land and procured by the museum for exhibition. On the evening of 27 May 2013, Blaine Lunstad, an amateur paleontologist, and his wife Michele Lunstad who is of Dutch descent, stumbled upon some bones in the "East Pasture", part of the land of farmer Lige M. Murray, fifty kilometres south of Jordan, Montana. Local fossil hunter Clayton "Dino Cowboy" Phipps confirmed that it was a tyrannosaur skeleton.