First T Rex fossil belatedly identified

News from Colorado:

A banana-shaped dinosaur tooth unearthed in Golden in 1874 sat in an East Coast museum cabinet for more than a century before a Denver researcher determined its true significance.

The 67 million-year-old fossil is the first collected specimen of Tyrannosaurus rex.

The revelation is of little scientific value, but it rewrites a piece of paleontological history, said curator Lyndon Murray of Yale University's Peabody Museum, where the 3 ½-inch serrated fossil tooth resides. Until now, Garfield County, Mont., was known as the site of the first T. rex discovery. Nearly half a skeleton was found there in 1902, and the species was named from that specimen three years later.

Posted by David on March 5, 2003 9:09 AM