As thunder boomed and lightning illuminated their small camper, Kathy Wankel couldn’t help but think that after years of being buried, the few fossilized bones she and her family had dug up that day, and carefully swaddled in towels and an old sweatshirt, did not want to be moved.
“It was such a terrible storm, it was like saying ‘Don’t take those bones out of there,’ ” Wankel, 61, said in a telephone interview.
This week, the now nearly complete fossilized skeleton of the Tyrannosaurus rex dinosaur that Wankel discovered in 1988 in Eastern Montana will be shipped from the Museum of the Rockies in Bozeman to the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History. There, the Wankel rex will be on loan for 50 years as the centerpiece of the museum’s new 31,000-square-foot national fossil hall, which will open in 2019.