BLM T. rex featured at Smithsonian Event

Oct 8, 2024

Serendipity can play a role in science as well as in life. In 2022, dad Sam Fisher, sons Liam Fisher and Jessin Fisher, and their cousin Kaiden Madsen were out exploring on their BLM public land in North Dakota when something caught their eyes. They knew right away it was a dinosaur bone, but what kind?

Two men and three boys in baseball caps pose in front of a table holding a model T. rex skull. — The family that found the “Teen Rex.” Left to right Kaiden Madsen, Liam Fisher, dad Sam Fisher, Jessin Fisher, and Tyler Lyson, Denver Museum of Nature and Science. BLM photo

Sam Fisher went to high school with Tyler Lyson, now the Curator of Vertebrate Paleontology at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science. So, he reached out to his classmate. Tyler visited the site the next summer in 2023.

Coincidently, Giant Screen Films was working on a film production about dinosaurs and wanted to get some film footage of a real dinosaur dig, so Director David Clark and his crew tagged along with Tyler and the Fisher family to see what they had discovered. Because the discovery was on BLM land, Tyler obtained a Paleontological Resources Use Permit from the Montana/Dakotas State Office.

Under a hot North Dakota sun, the team began cleaning rock and sediment off the find, and very quickly saw this was no ordinary fossil. The family had found a teenaged Tyrannosaurus rex, a rare find indeed.

The film crew captured the exuberance of the entire team when they realized what they found, and the project took on a whole new level of excitement. It also took on a whole new level of complexity. The field crew was able to prepare a large section of rock containing the fossil to be helicopter lifted out of the badlands and taken to Denver to be prepared.

Large piece of stone with embedded fossils is in a lab. — “Teen Rex” is prepared in full view of the public at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science. Lower jaw on the left, upper jaws to the right, and a large palm frond are visible. BLM photo

Director David Clark had a fantastic new angle for telling the story of tyrannosaurs, and used modern computer-generated imagery (CGI) to recreate the world of the specimen now dubbed “Teen rex.” Check out this website to learn about the movie: https://trex-film.com/

The Smithsonian Museum of Natural History invited all the participants of the project to Washington, D. C., in September 2024, for a special viewing of the new movie and for a panel discussion afterward. Several BLMers were also able to attend, and BLM was acknowledged many times for our role in providing important fossil specimens for scientific research.