The Perot Museum’s Pygmy T. Rex

Back in 1998, after years of sharing Utah and Wyoming and Texas dirt with other paleontologists, Anthony Fiorillo, earth sciences curator at the Perot Museum of Nature and Science, packed up his tools and headed north, into the Arctic Circle. He’s trekked up there every summer since. In 2011, he announced the discovery—along with Ronald Tykoski, the Perot Museum’s fossil preparator—of Pachyrhinosaurus perotorum, a new horned species. The pair’s most recent discovery is Nanuqsaurus hoglundi, a pygmy cousin of the Tyrannosaurus rex. The bones sat on a shelf for seven years in Dallas, waiting to be cleaned, but what’s seven years after 70 million in the ground, right?