KUALA LUMPUR, Dec 6 (Bernama) -- More than 1.5 million visitors have visited the Auckland Museum, New Zealand to see Barbara and Peter, the world’s first display of an adult male and female Tyrannosaurus rex (T. rex) pairing, which has run for a year, will draw to a close on Dec 10.
Given that New Zealand itself has a population of just 5.1 million inhabitants, the visitors who came to see the two T.rex dinosaurs are unprecedented, with numbers equivalent to a third of the population of the country.
Auckland Museum Chief Executive Officer, David Reeves said Barbara and Peter have provided a once-in-a-lifetime, educational experience for many, many thousands of school children.
“It has been a joy to see people’s reactions as they encounter these magnificent specimens for the first time,” he said in a statement.
T. rex fossils are extremely rare, with only about 20 of them on display in museums worldwide, and these were the first T. rex exhibits in the Southern Hemisphere, while there is no T. rex on permanent exhibit in the Middle East, the whole of Asia, Africa or Latin America, with only four T. rex on display in Europe.
Female T. rex specimens are rarer still, with Barbara representing only the third ever pregnant T. rex dinosaur skeleton to be discovered. Barbara is 44.7 per cent complete, making her the eighth most complete T. rex in the world, measuring an impressive 11.7 metres (m) long and 3.4m high.
Close viewing of the T.rex reveals some of the incredible anatomical features of one of the largest land predators of all time and offers the ability to inspect injuries that pathological findings revealed, specifically an injury to Barbara’s leg, likely to have been caused by another T. rex.
Alongside the exhibiting of Barbara and Peter, Auckland Museum has made public the preliminary scientific research on the specimens, undertaken by expert academics.
These preliminary reports have been prepared by two of the world’s top theropod palaeontologists from University of Kansas Biodiversity Institute and Natural History Museum, Dr David Burnham; and Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences, University of Manchester, Dr John Nudds, who studied both Barbara and Peter in their university laboratories for many months.
This unique display, together with published research, has afforded the public to gain a deeper understanding of the history and mysteries of the T. rex, providing insights into their origins, lives, and the remarkable process of finding and mounting fossil specimens.
-- BERNAMA
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