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youtu.be/rNMh62Jc_h0
People think finding a dinosaur means digging a hole and pulling out a skeleton. It almost never works that way.
Gus is a 38-foot-long T. rex, one of the largest and most complete ever discovered — 63% complete, with those bones making up 75 to 80% of the animal's total mass. He was found in 2021 in South Dakota, on a ranch where the team had just wrapped another project and decided, almost on a whim, to spend an awkward couple of days prospecting somewhere stranger than usual. The first bone — a metatarsal — broke the surface within hours.
What followed was five years of excavation, mapping, and restoration: nearly a thousand individual pieces collected, identified, and painstakingly reassembled by hand, bone by bone, in a process that has almost nothing in common with how the movies show it. The animal was eventually mounted on a custom armature inside one of the only spaces in town big enough to hold him — a pickleball court....