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T. rex skull replica added to the Museum of Geosciences

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The Museum of Geosciences within Derring Hall has unveiled its newest exhibit: a full-size T. Rex skull replica.
Go to https://geos.vt.edu/museum-of-geosciences.html for more information on how you can visit the museum.

This is actually one of the most complete T-rex skulls ever found, it's actually based on a real specimen that was found by the University of Washington, specifically the Burke Museum there they found it in 2015. When we talk about dinosaurs. We know they're big. But until you actually get up and close to one of these skulls, you don't actually know how big they are. And people always say a T-rex tooth is about the size of a banana. You can look at a banana, but when you see a whole bunch of them in a row, you really don't get that scale until you're right there in front of this kind of animal. So this tyrannosaurus skull really helps us introduce the idea of Earth history, of geosciences as a whole. And this is a mascot for understanding the past of our planet. But there's all this other material that tells us the same kind of story or different stories that you'll never get with this. But this is more iconic. And I'm hoping that brings people in to see everything else that we know about our planet. So we mostly like specialized in different minerals. We also specialize in rocks. Fossils is particularly fossils from Virginia to so we have different minerals like quartz lots of calcite just gorgeous minerals across the board. It's a pretty big collection, over 14 thousand mineral specimens. Everyone's welcome to come here. Just learned about geology in general and just appreciate it. Each one of these objects in this room tells a story. And those are the stories that you can't really get across reading from a textbook. But you can come and see many of these specimens you can feel and use. Most of your senses we're an open space and we're here for people to learn.