Gone for 65 million years, but remembered “forever”

New stamps from the U.S. Postal Service feature the fearsome Tyrannosaurus rex as an adorable hatchling and a lanky teenager.

T.rex Forever stamp

Covered in soft yellow down and freshly emerged from the egg scattered in fragments around it, a feisty hatchling stares hungrily at a beetle in flight, contemplating snapping it up in its birdlike-beak. Who would suspect the mouth of this tiny animal could somehow transform to hold a set of serrated, banana-sized teeth belonging to Tyrannosaurus Rex, Cretaceous-era dinosaur and the largest predator on Earth 65 million years ago?

Drawn by Canadian scientist and paleoartist Julius T. Csotonyi, the hatchling illustration is one of four new T. rex Forever stamps officially released by the U.S. Postal Service on Aug. 29 during a ceremony in the Natural History Museum’s Baird Auditorium. Meant to show T. rex at different points in its life cycle, creating the stamp set was fun, Csotonyi says, because based on scientific evidence, speculation and hypothesis we know today that “T. rex had these amazing changes in shape as they grew.”

T. rex Forever stamp

In addition to its soft down as a hatchling, another scientific publication revealed T. rex had long legs for running when young, Csotonyi says. A second stamp captures an adolescent T. rex with reddish skin and long lanky legs, chasing a small mammal.

T. rex is “the most American of dinosaurs,” Smithsonian Paleontologist Matthew Carrano told the ceremony crowd. “Dinosaurs vary across the Earth, but T. rex almost exclusively lived in the United States. There are a few specimens from Canada but that’s about it.”

The Natural History Museum’s T. rex, known as “the Nation’s T. rex” by the museum, was discovered on federal land in Montana in 1988.

Csotonyi consulted with Carrano and other experts on various elements of the stamps, conferring on such technical details as its skin color and texture at its different life stages and elements of the prehistoric environments displayed behind the animals in the stamps.

Csotonyi had done a good deal of artistic work on NMNH’s new Dinosaur Hall (which opened June 8), Carrano says, so he already knew a lot about drawing dinosaurs. He is also a scientist, “so wasn’t like working with someone starting from scratch.”

Anterior view of Tyrannosaurus rex biting the skull of Triceratops horridus.
In 1988, rancher Kathy Wankel discovered this Tyrannosaurus specimen while hiking on land managed by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. After a little digging with a garden shovel and a jackknife, she unearthed the first complete T. rex arm ever found. Dr. Jack Horner of the Museum of the Rockies led the mission to excavate the rest. This specimen was loaned to the Smithsonian in 2014 for 50 years, where it is to be displayed with the composite cast of a Triceratops horridus, assembled from the remains of several individual specimens. (Photo by Gary Mulcahey, Smithsonian Institution)

Fans of the Dinosaur Hall should quickly recognize the adult dinosaur on one of the stamps that mirrors the bent-over pose of the T. rex skeleton in the hall. It was Carrano’s suggestion that Csotonyi use this pose on the stamp, in part, because the stamp is lenticular, meaning it contains two different images. When tilted, the green skin of the adult T. rex vanishes to reveal the skeleton beneath.

“Both Csotonyi and the Post Office asked for references for the skeletal image of a T. rex and that’s where I suggested the pose we have in the exhibit as the model. Initially, the stamp set wasn’t going to have such a direct overlap with the exhibition,” Carrano says.

The T. rex in the dinosaur hall “is a very late teenage T. rex., close to an adult,” he adds. “The oldest known T. rex is probably Sue in the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago. She is probably 30 years old and it is conceivable these animals could live to be a bit older than that.”

Matthew Carrano, Curator of Dinosauria at the Smithsonian Institution National Museum of Natural History poses for a portrait near a cast of a Tyrannosaurus rex in 2011. (Matt McClain/FOR THE WASHINGTON POST)

Carrano and other paleontologists determine a dinosaur’s age by examining their bones. “Generally speaking, the bones have something analogous to tree rings, and so there is kind of an annual set of marks that you can look at. It’s not exact, but there’s a consistency from one to the next that you can use. So, we might undercount a little bit but probably not an enormous amount.

During the ceremony Carrano revealed he was doubly excited to be part of the stamp launching ceremony because he was a stamp collector as a kid. “The U.S. does not make a lot of dinosaur stamps, so this is and rare event and we are very proud to have our dinosaur be a part of this panorama.”

Natural History Museum director Kirk Johnson told the crowd he is delighted that the T. rex which is the centerpiece of the new David H. Koch Hall of Fossils – Deep Time, “will be flying around the nation on endless letters and postcards for the next several years.”

Johnson also revealed that the museum’s T. rex specimen was delivered to the Natural History Museum from Montana via Federal Express.

Tyrannosaurus Rex Forever stamps issued by the U.S. Postal Service.

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