IN 1895, THE PIONEERING American palaeontologist Edward Cope sold 10,000 pieces from his fossil collection to the American Museum of Natural History for $32,000. Included in the cache was a vertebrae found by Cope three years earlier in South Dakota and attributed by him to an extinct herbivore. In fact, it belonged to a Tyrannosaurus rex and was the first fossil to be discovered of that fabled creature.
Since then as many as fifty further T. rexes have been unearthed, most of them partial and comprising far less than half of the original skeleton
