For Immediate Release Contact: Pat Kremer (312) 665-7100 (For Media Use Only) The Field Museum is BIG on Dinosaurs! While You’re Here, Don’t Miss T. rex Sue and Evolving Planet Extend Your Visit at No Additional Charge Two permanent features at The Field Museum provide a perfect complement to Dinosaurs: Ancient Fossils, New Discoveries. Check out Sue, the biggest and most complete T. rex ever found, and learn about the pivotal role this enormous fossil played in some of the new ideas explored in the special exhibition. And don’t miss the expanded Genius Hall of Dinosaurs in the exhibition Evolving Planet, a great place to dig deeper into the subject. Sue Holds Clues to Mysteries of Dinosaur Growth…and More Sue is extremely popular with Field Museum visitors, of course. But did you know she’s equally popular with paleontologists? This amazing fossil is so complete (more than 90 percent of her bones were found) and so well preserved (it’s possible to see where muscles and tendons attached to the bones), it’s helped make important advances in dinosaur science. For example, detailed measurements of Sue’s bones and anatomical structures went into the calculations of T. rex body mass, stride, and speed – the kind of data used to create the moving model in the special exhibition. Because she’s so big – at or near the end of the tyrannosaur scale – Sue has helped scientists define the limits of how animals are built. Just a few years ago, paleontologist Gregory Erickson, a professor at Florida State University and a research associate of The Field, and Dr. Peter Makovicky, the Field’s dinosaur curator, calculated growth curves for several species of tyrannosaur; they determined the age of the specimens by counting the growth rings in their bones and estimated body mass from measurements of the leg bones. (The smallest specimen in their sample was “Elmer,” a Gorgosaurus that’s been in the Field’s collection since its discovery by Elmer Riggs in 1922. Elmer can currently be seen in Dinosaurs: Ancient Fossils, New Discoveries.) Their study showed that tyrannosaurs reached adult size in about the same timeframe as humans. The research also revealed an amazing fact about T. rex growth: between the ages of 14 and 18, T. rex adolescents put on more than half of their adult weight, gaining an average of 4.6 pounds a day! Sue was also the first dinosaur ever examined by industrial CT technology designed for jet engines. Taking a non-invasive, virtual tour through Sue’s skull, scientists discovered birdlike characteristics in the T. rex brain. See the video yourself, just upstairs from Sue. Continue>>