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Old 09-28-2020, 02:19 PM
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Arrow The U.S. Army Owns…Dinosaurs?

The U.S. Army Owns…Dinosaurs?
By: Claire Barrett - History Net News - 09-28-20
Re: https://www.historynet.com/the-u-s-a...-dinosaurs.htm

Photo(s): On link site only.
Wankel's T. rex on display at the Smithsonian.

Created by George Washington during the Revolutionary War and made a permanent, distinct body within the U.S. Army in 1802, the Corps of Engineers now manages over 8,000,000 acres of land in the U.S. It also owns, rather unintentionally, an enormous collection of fossils and one of the most intact Tyrannosaurus rex skeletons to ever be found.

“The U.S. Army Corps has collections that span the paleontological record,” Nancy Brighton, a supervisory archaeologist for the Corps, told Atlas Obscura. “Basically anything related to animals and the natural world before humans came onto the scene.”

Its collection began to expand almost by mistake in 1936 after President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed the Flood Control Act. The act—which would lead to an impressive array of dams, levees, and dikes being erected across the country—required the Corps to first survey the land on which they were to be built, with the dams themselves flooding and exposing millions-of-years-old fossil beds.

“I would say the majority of our archaeological [and paleontological] collections have come from the construction of the hydropower and flood control projects that happened in the 50s, 60s, and 70s,” Jen Reardon, an archaeologist with the Corps told Atlas Obscura.

It wasn’t until 1988, however, that the Corps discovered one of its greatest artifacts by way of Kathy Wankel, a hiker and amateur fossil hunter. After 66 million winters locked into what the Washington Post referred to as a “geologic hug,” Wankel, while hiking through Fort Peck Reservoir, caught a glimpse of what looked to be a shoulder blade protruding from the sediment in Montana.

“The light was just perfect. I could even see the webby pattern of the bone marrow,” Kathy Wankel later recalled to the Post. Wankel, alongside her husband Tom, had discovered the skeletal remains of a T. rex**—just one of eight to have been found since Henry Fairfield Osborn first described the species in 1905. Some 50 T. rex specimens have since been found.

Most fossils were left in place by the Corps. However, Wankel’s discovery was different.

After nearly a year of figuring out who controlled the land—the remains were found on the shore of a federal reservoir at the edge of a national wildlife refuge—members of the Army Corps of Engineers alongside paleontologists Jack Horner and Pat Leiggi, then the chief fossil preparatory at Montana State University—began to dig.

Over the span of several years, the team methodically brushed and dug around what was revealed to be a 38-foot-long T. rex skeleton, weighing nearly six tons and almost 90 percent intact. Called MOR555 or “Wankel’s T. rex,” it was the first of such specimens to have been found with its distinctively small lower arm bone.

Originally put on display at the Museum of the Rockies, since 2014 Wankel’s T. rex has found its home at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C. The Army Corps, the legal owners of the skeleton, agreed to a 50-year loan to the Smithsonian where an estimated seven million visitors can see it every year.

Once displayed in its original “death pose,” a 2019 renovation to the museum saw the dinosaur stand up for the first time in over 66 millions years. Now, the dinosaur can be seen biting the head of a fossilized triceratops.

“People can think he killed it, but maybe he just found it,” Kirk Johnson, the director of the museum told the Post.

“It’s best to be clear about where your knowledge ends and speculation begins.”

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Personal note: Now that's something I never heard before.

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