Dinos in Pop Culture - The Wall Drug, SD

Continuing my travels across country, moving from Utah to New York, we have stopped at our next non-National Park geological stop. Well ... maybe not "geological" per say, but it does have a dinosaur!

Wall Drug, SD

The Wall Drug is in my opinion THE road side attraction. Located just off Interstate 90, the Wall Drug is a massive Drug Store (?) located in the town of Wall, SD. But it is so much more than that. The reason many people visit the Wall Drug is their constant barrage of billboards as you drive down the highway for hundreds of miles in all directions. Per their website they also have signs globally: 

Over the years, Hustead’s Wall Drug signs could be seen in sites as distant as Morocco, Amsterdam, and London, and during World War II, American G.I.s carried the Wall Drug message across the globe, proclaiming how many miles it was back to Wall Drug.

And what started out as a drug store where you could get "free Ice Water", has turned into an ever expanding cavalcade of displays, stores, food, and attractions. But, the one attraction that got my attention was the animatronic Tyrannosaurus rex (AKA a T. rex), located towards the back of the store. 

And like a good animatronic, just taking a picture isn't enough, so here is a video of it in action.

Obviously this display is reminiscent of Jurassic Park, which also included a T. rex under lockdown. To give a general background on the T. rex, the first Tyrannosaurus rex skeleton was discovered in 1902 by Barnum Brown, the then assistant curator for the Department of Vertebrate Paleontology at the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH) in New York. The bones, discovered in the Hell Creek Formation near Hell Creek, Montana, were identified by a local land owner who then told Brown. The skeleton, only 10% complete, took 3 years to excavate and was then transported to the AMNH where the paleontology curator of the museum, Henry Fairfield Osborn, named the fossil in 1905 Tyrannosaurus rex, meaning "Tyrant Lizard King". 

Original mount of the T. rex. Image courtesy of the AMNH

All fossils of the T. rex have since been found in western North America, ranging from southern Canada down into southern New Mexico and Texas. The T. rex was also one of the last living non-avian dinosaurs, having lived during the late Cretaceous period from about 68 to 66 million years ago, which is when the meteorite struck the Earth, wiping out those non-avian dinosaurs. Although the skeleton discovered initially by Brown was only a partial skeleton, an even more complete skeleton was discovered by Brown 6 years later that became the basis for the skeleton seen above, mounted at the AMNH. It is this mount that went on to influence pop-culture for most of the next hundred years, where the T. rex was almost always portrayed in a vertical pose. Unfortunately this pose was set up mostly because of the steel armature could not do a more dynamic pose. Many of the tail vertebrae even needed to be broken in order to get the T. rex to be standing like this. 

And of course, me with the T. rex during the times of Covid.

It wasn't until 1993's Jurassic Park, that movie and tv makers really started to take a look at the advancing science behind the dinosaurs and adjusted their models accordingly. For the movie, the T. rex is presented in a much more accurate model, where the body of the beast is balanced over the legs, with the tail acting as a counterweight, forming a giant see-saw. This remodeled T. rex also gives us a much more accurate depiction of its size, where an adult can grow up to ~12 feet tall at the hip and ~40 feet long from tip of the tail to snout. But one of the most notable features of a T. rex were its teeth, that ranged in size up to 12 inches long, which included the root, still leaving approximately a 6 inch tooth exposed. And despite this animatronic being installed in the Wall Drug around 2006, it still does seem to maintain that more upright, incorrect, pose, than the one more closely associated with the Jurassic Park franchise, where the T. rex is balanced horizontally across its legs. The teeth however in this model do appear to be appropriately sized, although they be a little small in comparison to the smaller size of this T. rex compared to a full grown one.