What's in a Name? The Battle of Baby T. Rex and Nanotyrannus.

A dinosaur fossil listed for sale in London for $20 million embodies one of the most heated debates in paleontology. From a report: When fossil hunters unearthed the remains of a dinosaur from the hills of eastern Montana five years ago, they carried several key characteristics of a Tyrannosaurus rex: a pair of giant legs for walking, a much smaller pair of arms for slashing prey, and a long tail stretching behind it. But unlike a full-grown T. rex, which would be about the size of a city bus, this dinosaur was more like the size of a pickup truck. The specimen, which is now listed for sale for $20 million at an art gallery in London, raises a question that has come to obsess paleontologists: Is it simply a young T. rex who died before reaching maturity, or does it represent a different but related species of dinosaur known as a Nanotyrannus? The dispute has produced reams of scientific research and decades of debate, polarizing paleontologists along the way. Now, with dinosaur fossils increasingly fetching eye-popping prices at auction, the once-esoteric dispute has begun to ripple through auction houses and galleries, where some see the T. rex name as a valuable brand that can more easily command high prices. "It's ultimately a quite in-the-weeds question of the taxonomy and the classification of one very particular type of dinosaur," said Steve Brusatte, a paleontologist at the University of Edinburgh. "However, it involves T. rex, and the debate always gets a little bit more ferocious when the king of dinosaurs is involved." On the internet, juvenile T. rex versus Nanotyrannus has become something of a meme, providing fuel for jokes on niche social media channels. ("I won't believe in Nanotyrannus until it shows up at my own door and devours me," a paleontology student with the handle "TheDinoBuff" joked recently on the social media site X.) The gallery selling the specimen discovered in Montana -- which is known as Chomper -- was faced with a choice. Call it a juvenile T. rex? Label it a Nanotyrannus? Or embrace the ambiguity of an unresolved scientific debate? The David Aaron gallery in London went with calling it a "rare juvenile Tyrannosaurus rex skeleton." It cited an influential 2020 paper on the subject led by Holly N. Woodward, which used an analysis of growth rings within bone samples from two disputed specimens -- which are estimated to have been similarly sized to Chomper -- to argue that they were juveniles nearing growth spurts.

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