Move Over SUE, There's a New T. rex in Town

Photo by Claire Eamer

by L. E. Carmichael

Of all the dinosaurs in all the world, SUE the T. rex might be the most famous. The most complete T. rex skeleton ever found, SUE is likely also the most well-traveled. Her bones, or at least casts of them, have been displayed all over the world. The casts I saw in Nova Scotia came with bilingual displays written in English and Arabic!

But there's a new king of the dinosaurs in town, and his name is Scotty.

Named after a bottle of Scotch the scientists toasted his 1991 discovery with, Scotty is only 65% complete, compared to SUE's 90%. But he stands out for another reason - as far as we currently know, he's the biggest carnivore ever to walk the earth.

As any forensic anthropologist will tell you, there's a certain amount of instinct and guess-work involved in reconstructing height and weight from nothing but bones. But measurements of Scotty's femur (the long, heavy bone from his thigh) suggest he was in the ballpark of 19,500 pounds - almost a ton more than SUE.

He was also a senior citizen - at approximately 28 years old, Scotty lived longer than any other T. rex we currently know about. And he was a tough old dude, surviving a broken rib, fractured tail bones, and an infected jaw. Those injuries showed signs of healing, meaning they likely weren't his ultimate cause of death.

Now that Canadian palaeontologists have had a chance to study him, Scotty will be making his public debut at the Royal Saskatchewan Museum this May.  No word yet on whether he'll be joining his cousin SUE on tour!

An Iceberg of Women in Science

Grace Lockhart was the first woman in the whole British Empire to graduate from a university. It was 1874 when she got a science degree up at Mount Allison University in New Brunswick, Canada, but it was almost another 50 years before all women got the right to graduate or even to attend classes in Canada (and the UK). Nicaragua started allowing women in university about 100 years before that and Italy started about 700 years earlier. Once women could graduate, they still usually didn’t get credit for their discoveries and inventions. But that didn’t stop some of the brightest female minds from contributing to human knowledge and technology.

We hear little bits now, often in form of stories about the wives who innovated beside their husbands, brothers, and employers, did the field work, catalogued all the specimens, built the telescopes, designed the experiments, or crunched the data. The information is coming out now. Slowly.

Blockbuster films like Hidden Figures, memes that give credit where it is due, and announcements of “all female firsts” like the space walk this month led by Kristen Facciol,

a female flight controller from the Canadian Space Agency give us the sense that there is a whole iceberg of information waiting to be revealed about female scientists throughout history.

scientist: "does everyone here know what Watson and Crick discovered?"
me from back of room: "Rosalind Franklin's notes"

— Robby Kraft (@RobbyKraft) May 3, 2016

My high school science teacher 30 years ago taught me about Madame Curie’s experiments with radiation, but that was the only thing I’d ever heard about a woman doing science. It’s getting easier to learn more about women doing science throughout history: buy books about them; watch movies about them; ask questions about them at the science centre; ask teachers about them. The more interest we show, the more answers will get shared.

Search this blog for “women” and you’ll find several posts. A Mighty Girl regularly posts stories and cool posters about female scientists and inventors and all kinds of other interesting women, both old and current. Brain Pickings has great stories about women in science, as does scientificwomen.net, and you’ll find great summaries on YouTube, too. Take a look around, then tell others the cool things you learned.

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by Adrienne Montgomerie
photo from Pixabay