Tyrannosaurus rex, Osborn, 1905

Russell, Dale A., 1970, Tyrannosaurs from the Late Cretaceous of western Canada, Ottawa: National Museum of Natural Sciences, Publications in Palaeontology, No. 1 : 19

cf. Tyrannosaurus rex

Distribution

Upper Edmonton Formation, Alberta.

Referred Specimens

NMC 9950 phalanx of pes (7 miles east of Huxley, centre sec. 10, tp. 34, rge. 22, W. 4th mer., about 170 feet above Kneehills Tuff").

NMC 9554 fragment of cervical centrum (20 feet below and 200 yards south of locality for NMC 9950).

Comments

The presence of Tyrannosaurus in Lance equivalent upper Edmonton strata has been noted several times {see Sternberg 1949; L. S. Russell 1964; Langston 1965). This record is based primarily on a badly eroded and shattered skeleton observed by Sternberg in 1946, weathering out of a fractured concretion high on the face of a cliff". Langston revisited the locality in 1960 and collected a phalanx, noting that the skeleton was even more badly damaged than when Sternberg discovered it, and that little of it still remained in situ.

The phalanx ( NMC 9950 ) is the fourth one of the fourth toe and measures 53 mm in length and about 80 mm across its distal articulation. Hence it is larger and broader than the corresponding element in Albertosaurus and Daspletosaurus . Unfortunately only the first phalanx of the fourth toe is known in Tyrannosaurus ( Osborn 1906: fig. 11). This bone is relatively broader than in any known Oldman or Edmonton form, and by analogy it seems probable that the above fourth phalanx may indeed belong to Tyrannosaurus . The vertebra ( NMC 9554 ) is generically indeterminate.