A T-rex named Sue

Posted by valska under Exhibitions
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Shot with the Treo 650 as I was in a rush to leave the house and forgot to bring my camera today.

We went to the Singapore Science Centre today - one of the husband’s projects at work. Watching the IMAX movie, T-Rex: Back to the Cretaceous, was really painful (if not seated in the middle or further up in the Omni-theatre, one would be treated to a giant image of the actor’s butt and get really disoriented by the distortion caused by the dome-shaped theatre).

Getting to see Sue was a real treat, though.

Sue is the world’s largest, best-preserved and most complete Tyrannosaurus rex specimen that has been discovered so far. This specimen is named after its discoverer, Sue Hendrickson, a fossil hunter who found this fossil in 1990. This T-rex fossil is currently the most complete one with some 90% of her bones recovered.

As a kid, I wanted to be an archaeologist - I fancied myself armed with brushes and tools, excavating some important piece of history. By extension, dinosaur findings and postulations facinated me to a certain degree. I particularly enjoyed the movie Jurassic Park and it was one of the very few movies that I could watch over and over again. The Land Before Time was the first movie that made me cry.

And who goes to the science centre without gaining knowledge? I learnt, today, that:

(i) The T-rex has just two claws on each hand, not three (as I initially thought).
(ii) That carnivorous dinosaurs had hollow bones while herbivorous dinosaurs had solid bones.
(iii) The brontosaurus did not exist but was actually another dinosaur, the Apatosaurus (oh the horror!).

We left the place with two books from a special branch of The Early Learning Centre set up for the dinosaur exhibition.

How to Keep Dinosaurs by Robert Mash (which is a hilarious yet educational take on the various species of dinosaurs) and Encyclopedia Prehistorica Dinosaurs: The Definitive Pop-Up by Robert Sabuda & Matthew Reinhart (which is a beautiful pop-up book with more than 35 pop-ups, with the T-rex as the most glorious looking one). I really hope Clare enjoys, not destroys, the latter.

On another note, there really has got to be a more dignified way to display these extinct birds: