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NARRATOR: This is the king of time. For many of us, Tyrannosaurus rex is the dinosaur—our lens into a lost world. Since its discovery, the word “Tyrannosaurus” has been used in print more than twice as many times as any other dinosaur name.

And T. rex landed its first starring role the same year as Rudolph Valentino. Ever since a fossil hunter from the American Museum of Natural History dug Tyrannosaurus rex out of the Montana dirt, it’s ruled our view of the past.

MIKE NOVACEK (Provost of Science and Curator, Division of Paleontology): Icons tend to capture the public imagination. They’re just too big and too- sometimes too ugly, and sometimes too beautiful to be denied.

CHIP KIDD (Graphic Designer): In my work, I get to read the manuscript first. So, I read the manuscript of Jurassic Park. We’re talking, this would have been back in 1989. I was relatively young… Twenty-five, 26. Junior designer for book jackets at Alfred A. Knopf.

NARRATOR: Chip Kidd is the man behind a famous dinosaur. Behind him is the dinosaur that inspired his famous book cover. When tasked with creating a design for Michael Crichton’s Jurassic Park, Chip searched for ideas.

KIDD: Certainly, there’s a lot of books on dinosaurs. Scientific paleontology and fantasy and everything in between. So, the problem to solve when creating the first edition book jacket for Jurassic Park was to somehow entice the reader into a story that was about dinosaurs, but like nothing that they had ever encountered before.

But I do remember, before I started and I was talking to our Editor-In-Chief. And I do remember him saying, you know, “Think of something as iconic as Jaws. That’s what we want to come up with.” And I’m thinking, “Well, yeah, that would be nice, but I don’t see how that’s going to happen in a million years. But hey!”

We tried a bunch of different things. I remember we tried commissioning a painting of what a close-up of dinosaur skin would look like. And the answer was it didn’t really look like much of anything. 

I’ve always been fascinated by pterodactyls. I tried that. But, you know, really, of course you’ve gotta give the T. rex a try. 

NARRATOR: T. rex has come to be a shorthand for all dinosaurs. It didn’t live in the Jurassic, but Cretaceous Park didn’t have the same ring.

KIDD: And so, I came here to the Museum of Natural History and just hung out and stared at this guy.

NARRATOR: This is AMNH 5027. It doesn’t have a cute nickname. But it was one of the first dinosaurs displayed to the public. So, it’s had time to leave a big footprint.

NOVACEK: It’s certainly fair to say that our T. rex is one of the world’s most famous dinosaurs, if not THE most famous. Tyrannosaurus rex, this skull, is a very important scientific discovery. The first really complete skull and skeleton of a Tyrannosaurus ever discovered. Since the early 1900s, we’ve had many decades to absorb T. rex into our own cultural fabric. 

NARRATOR: This specimen, seen by millions of visitors every year, has shaped our collective idea of what a dinosaur is.

In the beginning, this was T. rex. Nine years later, in 1915, crowds thrilled at the site of a towering Tyrannosaurus rex. To the public, it was a monster with enviable posture. But paleontologists already knew the stiff, prizefighter stance wasn’t right.

Planning models showed more nimble animals, but the metal rods that had to hold up several tons of fossil could only support the T. rex in a very vertical pose. 

Thus were born generations of tremendous tail-draggers. It started with the skeleton, and this early illustration by Charles Knight, done for the Museum. One of the first dinosaurs on film was almost an exact copy. This is T. rex’s movie debut, in a 1918 film called “The Ghost of Slumber Mountain.”

That same animator would go on to make King Kong, which also featured a T. rex. And the Museum Tyrannosaurus was solidly lodged in pop culture. 

Barnum Brown, the discoverer of T. rex, consulted with Walt Disney on the dinosaurs of Fantasia. And Godzilla carried the DNA of Specimen 5027 in his mutated cells.

It was the dinosaur that ruled our imagination for decades. The only mounted Tyrannosaurus seen for a quarter century. 

NOVACEK: When I was a kid, I mean, I guess my image of T. rex was a kind of ink etching of a T. rex standing in front of a bunch of palm trees. And he’s fully standing erect with his hands up and his tail dragging on the ground, just in those traditional ways. It’s kind of the same image you see in books like Jurassic Park.

NARRATOR: After staring at specimen 5027, which at the time was still posed in a very upright stance, Chip made his way to the Museum gift shop and bought a book.

KIDD: This is the book.

NARRATOR: The book is Vertebrate Paleontology and Evolution. And the drawing is adapted from a paper published in 1917 by the Museum paleontologist who named the species Tyrannosaurus rex, after Barnum Brown dug it up.

And it’s an illustration of this very same specimen. You can tell because of this little bump—right here. When this particular T. rex was fossilized, one of its bones—this one—the ectopterygoid, which supports biting force, got shoved out of place. It makes for a very distinctive profile.

So, Chip took this scientific illustration of specimen 5027 and started working.

KIDD: This was totally pre-computer. We were still doing everything in the art department by hand. I was literally tracing it, but I was making creative decisions about how to alter it to make it into something somewhere between just a skeleton and a completed animal.

NARRATOR: Chip’s design was sent off to Michael Crichton for approval. The reply was swiftly delivered via fax machine.

KIDD: I think it said, “Wow, fantastic [bleeping] jacket.”

NARRATOR: Jurassic Park hit the shelves in 1990 and was on the best seller list for 12 weeks. And that was before the movie came out. 

KIDD: They did an advance screening of the first movie for us. And we’re sitting there, and the movie comes on and you get to the part where they’re finally going to the park. And there is the sign. And we’re like, “Oh my god.” 

NARRATOR: Universal Studios had licensed Chip’s design and adapted it, almost unchanged, for the poster. See? It still has the bump. It’s specimen 5027’s birthmark—distinctive and unique among all fossils. 

So, this very dinosaur has made its way onto countless t-shirts, toys, Jurassic Park Cheez-Its, and this.

KIDD: This is the official Jurassic World toaster. And it burns an image of the drawing into a piece of bread.

NARRATOR: Well, it’s supposed to. Not everything can live up to the T. rex’s oversized reputation.

NOVACEK: There’s no predator in the history of the Earth on land that was bigger, and by inference, more ferocious.

MARK NORELL (Macauley Curator, Division of Paleontology & Curator of T. rex: The Ultimate Predator): I think that it’s probably by far the best-known dinosaur. Because of its notoriety, and because it was found in North America it probably is the most studied dinosaur of all the dinosaurs that we know.

NARRATOR: Our concept of what T. rex looked like and how it moved has radically changed as we’ve learned more about it.

NORELL: In looking at most tyrannosaur models, the body is just so big and fat and totally robust. I mean, I don’t view Tyrannosaurus that way. And I think that the skeletal evidence really shows that they were much thinner. They were very svelte animals.

NARRATOR: And they probably looked a little fluffier.

NORELL: From all the inferential evidence we have, adult tyrannosaurs were feathered.

NOVACEK: People sometimes don’t like a revision of what they cherish, in terms of their own imagery. But what I find is that over time, that’s easily changed. Because younger people come to it without those kinds of connections to their own nostalgia. As science becomes more understood, it’s absorbed by culture. 

KIDD: You know, dinosaur skeletons suggest the dinosaur, but we have to complete it in our heads. When you come here, to the Museum, you know, your imagination takes over and you imagine these things walking around and how big they are and a dinosaur skeleton is- it’s mysterious.

NARRATOR: It’s that mystery that keeps us coming back. Our imaginations layer the possibilities of millions of years over these bones. This is as close as we come to walking in the shadow of deep time.