Back in his day, the T. rex could clear a scene just by eyeing it. He wasn’t the most well-received among his peers; get cornered by that monster, they knew, and you were plain out of luck. Chance encounters with the tyrant lizard king were to be avoided at all costs – nothing good could ever come of that.
What a difference 66 million years can make.
Now Mr. Popularity, the life of the party, the T. rex draws a crowd wherever he goes these days. People come to him. Museums and educational centers don’t just welcome him, they vie for him, hunt him down.
And that’s exactly what Phil Manning, paleontology professor and newly appointed director of the College’s Mace Brown Natural History Museum, and his wife, Victoria Egerton, adjunct faculty member of the geology department, did to get the 13-foot-tall, 41-foot-long cast of “Bucky,” an adolescent T. rex, mounted in the Sciences and Mathematics Building’s atrium for all of 2016.
On loan from the Children’s Museum of Indianapolis – which the College is working with on various outreach, research and teaching projects, including expeditions to Wyoming and South Dakota – Bucky is a welcome addition to campus and is attracting the attention and imaginations of schoolchildren, CofC students and adults alike.
Indeed, if it was hospitality the T. rex was after, he’s found it at the College.
