SPANNING almost 40ft in length and weighs the same as four Mini Cooper cars, Trix the T-rex is no small-time lightweight.
Now the rare skeleton is preparing to welcome mammoth crowds in the only Scottish stop of its European tour.
From April 18 until July 31, Trix will be on show in a bespoke, climate-controlled 600 square metre pavilion at Glasgow’s Kelvin Hall.
Since starting in September 2016, the T-rex in Town tour has also visited Salzburg, Barcelona, Paris and Lisbon while work continues on a new permanent home for the fossil find at the Naturalis Biodiversity Centre in Leiden, Holland.
More than 250 bones were yesterday being put together by an expert team to complete the dinosaur ahead of its Scottish debut. As much as 70% of these are real fossils, and the remainder replicas.
Remmert Schouten, conservator at the Natural History Museum of the Netherlands, said: “We’re looking at an extraordinary complete skeleton, in terms of palaeontology.
“We put that together and at the end you get the same skeleton you might have seen many times before, but it’s always in a different space and it has a different setting.
“Every time, it’s a surprise and a sense of awe.”
Believed to be a female specimen, Trix had scars on her jaw which were caused by another T-rex. This could either be the result of a “scrap” or a “love bite”, the experts say.
Trix is one of only three T-rex skeletons in the world and it was discovered in Montana in the United States. Meanwhile, the famous Diplodocus sculpture Dippy remains on display at the Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum across the road from the Kelvin Hall.
Tickets for the Kelvin Hall exhibition are available now.
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