Can You Draw a T. Rex Correctly?

Stones & Bones is back! Today we explore why it’s so difficult for people to correctly draw a T. rex. Put your email here to make sure you get every Stones & Bones.

In 2011, I was in the middle of interviewing Warren Allmon, a professor of paleontology at Cornell University, for my college newspaper when he told me to take out a pen and a piece of paper. Then he gave me a simple instruction I would never forget: “Draw a T. rex.”

I was perplexed but figured I would ace it. After all, as a child, I was obsessed with dinosaurs, had shelves full of figurines, and loved to doodle Spinosaurus, Brachiosaurus, and, of course, Tyrannosaurus rex.

So, after adorning my drawing with razor-sharp teeth and claws, I turned the paper to Allmon for approval. He responded with something along the lines of “That’s nice—but it’s completely wrong. Why did you draw it standing up straight? Scientists haven’t thought that T. rex stood up straight since the 1970s.”

My heart sank. He was right; the posture was all wrong. Why did I sketch it with a vertical vertebral column as if it were a 21st-century human? And how could I have drawn the regal tyrant dragging its tail?

Allmon, perhaps noticing my silent spiraling, told me not to worry, as my results were unsurprising. An auditorium’s worth of students had made the same mistake before me. For years, Allmon, the director of the Paleontological Research Institution in Ithaca, New York, and his colleague Robert Ross, also a paleontologist at PRI, had asked students to draw a T. rex. They collected the data and in 2013 published their results.

They found that 72 percent of college students and 63 percent of precollege students they surveyed drew T. rex standing upright rather than in a correct horizontal posture.

In fact, their drawings were closer to what T. rex looked like when paleontologists first put it on display in 1905, with a spinal angle of approximately 57 degrees to a horizontal line. Scientists today display it with a spinal angle of 0 to 10 degrees relative to the horizontal.

Allmon attributed the disconnect to unscientific and outdated “dino crap,” as he calls it. Think things like Barney & Friends, cheap plastic toys, or dinosaur chicken nuggets that have imprinted themselves upon the public’s perception of dinosaurs despite how far the scientific literature has progressed.

“For most people, all of our dinosaur knowledge goes to hell once we turn about seven,” he told me at the time. Mesozoic mania, it seems, rarely continues into one’s adulthood.

All this has stuck with me since college because it’s such a clear example of the gulf between what the public thinks about dinosaurs and what the science says. But it’s been 15 years since I mucked up my T. rex, and I was curious if Allmon and Ross are still running their experiments. And if so, has anything changed? Are we still drawing T. rex wrong?

Turns out they never stopped quizzing their students. Ross now has 25 years’ worth of data. By his conservative estimate, he and Allmon have collected more than 5,000 drawings from their college students at both Cornell and nearby Ithaca College.

During a recent video call, he gave me a sneak peek as he opened a spreadsheet with photos from his most recent class.

The first image that popped up was a T. rex drawn with a horizontal posture, and its tail lifted off the ground. Success? Not quite, as I couldn’t help myself from blurting out, “Wait, that one has four legs!”

“Oh my God, that’s truly horrific,” said Allmon.

The next one looked more promising as it correctly had only two legs, and the tail was in the air. But it was standing up straight and had spikes running down its back like Godzilla, as well as “too many fingers on the hands,” as Allmon pointed out.

Ross clicked through a few more, and some did seem to be scientifically accurate, though those were in the minority. I secretly felt a little vindicated for my college self, as it seemed that even today we’re still messing up T. rex.

It got me thinking, what are some other examples of a disconnect between the public and the paleontological world? I reached out to a few paleontologists to ask for their thoughts.

“The obvious one is that many dinosaurs were feathered!” said Kiersten Formoso, a vertebrate paleontologist at Rutgers University in New Jersey. Perhaps the best example is Velociraptor, which in real life was covered in plumage and only about the size of a turkey, unlike its Jurassic Park counterpart, which was scaly and modeled after the larger and more ferocious Deinonychus.

“I think a lot of people still don’t understand that birds are dinosaurs,” added Jingmai O’Connor, a paleontologist at the Field Museum in Chicago. “I personally think dinosaur-shaped chicken nuggets should advertise themselves as ‘MADE WITH REAL DINOSAUR.’”

Riley Black, a National Geographic contributor, pointed out that birds are so old they lived alongside non-avian dinosaurs for roughly a hundred million years. The oldest, Archaeopteryx, she said, is 150 million years old and dates to the same time that Stegosaurus and Allosaurus roamed the planet.

Speaking about Stegosaurus, the spiky, lumbering behemoth is often depicted living alongside T. rex. Yet the two were separated by more than 80 million years. You, right now, are closer in time to T. rex than it was to Stegosaurus.

Another T. rex misconception is that it roared, said Julia Clarke, a paleontologist at the University of Texas at Austin. “A bellow, or a rumble, or a boom would be better descriptors” for its call.

Holly Woodward Ballard, a paleontologist at Oklahoma State University, added that “what is considered a dinosaur is still shockingly misunderstood.” Take Dimetrodon (a synapsid with a large sail), pterosaurs (flying reptiles), and marine reptiles like mosasaurs and plesiosaurs—none of these are dinosaurs, yet they are still often lumped together as dinos by the public.

Ross and Allmon had one more misconception they wanted to debunk: the idea that “dinosaur” is a derogatory term meaning “outdated” or “unable to adapt.”

“If you look at the actual record, dinosaurs are among the most spectacularly successful animals to ever live and were so right up to the point of the extinction [event],” Ross said. “Anyone should be flattered to be compared to a dinosaur.”

Can Your Friends Draw a T. rex?

After my call with Ross and Allmon, I was curious if my National Geographic colleagues would fare better than college students at the T. rex challenge. So I put them to the test during a team meeting.

“I think what you’re going to get is Barney,” one editor remarked. That seemed to be the case as most of their T. rexes were standing upright like those inflatable dinosaur Halloween costumes. I got similar results when I gave my family members the same task over Labor Day weekend (including at least two T. rexes with four legs!).

So, Stones & Bones readers, next time you’re with your friends and family, ask them to draw a T. rex—and share the results with us! Bonus points if you send us photos of their drawings—we might feature them in a future newsletter.

Tyrannosaurus Trackway

National Geographic Explorer Tyler Lyson had only known of a total of two adult Tyrannosaurus rex footprints in the entire world, one in New Mexico and one in Montana. So he was skeptical last year when one of the volunteers he brought to the Hell Creek Badlands to help hunt for fossils texted to say he’d found not one T. rex footprint but a series of them.

This week, my colleague Dustin Renwick, director of production for National Geographic Live, tells the story of high school teacher Kent Hups, the unlikely fossil hunter who made history with the discovery. Lyson, a paleontologist at the Denver Museum of Nature & Science, shared the backstory behind the impressive find with me at the National Geographic Explorers Festival in July.

After a closer look at Hups’s photograph of a footprint and a little subsequent digging, Lyson recalled turning to Hups and giving the good news: “This is 100 percent the first adult T. rex trackway ever found. Congratulations!” Check out Renwick’s story for the full details of the discovery—and don’t miss National Geographic Live senior producer Alex Wenchel’s incredible photographs of these three-toed beauties beneath the stars of North Dakota.

Tyler Lyson will tour North America as the host of a new National Geographic Live stage show, “Death of the Dinosaurs,” premiering in April 2027. Find him in your city.

Naming a Prehistoric Shell-Smasher

I’ve also been waiting for a chance to tell the world about another find Lyson told me about at the Explorers Festival: the discovery of a new 65.5 million-year-old crocodile relative named Mandrasuchus milleri in honor of Ian Miller, the chief science and innovation officer at the National Geographic Society. The new species was announced last week in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology.

I reached out to Miller—fresh from the Arctic, where he was collecting pollen and volcanic ash dating back to the demise of the dinosaurs—to get his reaction. Below are his responses, lightly edited for length and clarity:

What’s it like having this new croc, Mandrasuchus milleri, named after you?

Miller: It’s equal parts surreal, humbling, and, honestly, delightful! It’s not often that you get a 66 million-year-old, shell-crushing alligatorid named after you! I’ve spent my life studying evolution and poring over taxonomic papers to try to assemble the tapestry of life on Earth. Knowing there’s a newly described heavily armored “alligator” swimming through the paleontological literature with my name attached? That’s the highest honor a paleontologist could ask for.

What, in your opinion, makes Mandrasuchus milleri so cool?

Miller: First, the age of Mandrasuchus is incredible. This species evolved in North America in the immediate aftermath of the asteroid impact and K-Pg mass extinction, the event that wiped out the non-avian dinosaurs. While the Earth was recovering from the worst event in the history of multicellular life, Mandrasuchus was thriving!

What really hits home for me is what this specimen tells us about ecological resilience …It’s a remarkable testament to how life doesn’t just survive catastrophic change, it repopulates, adapts, evolves, and radiates.

Your Suggestions for a New Pterosaur’s Name

Last month I told you about National Geographic Explorer Hesham Sallam and how his team discovered Egypt’s first ever pterosaur fossil while excavating the fabled Bahariya Oasis. Sallam and his team are not sure whether it is a new species, but that didn’t stop us here at Stones & Bones from pondering some potential names just in case.

I suggested they name it after Wadjet, a winged serpent deity depicted in ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs and on King Tutankhamun’s golden throne. Several readers liked that option, and some wrote in their own suggestions.

“Pterosaur aegyptos gets my vote!” said Stones & Bones reader Lois Sprengnether Keel. Other readers sent in names that were a little less taxonomic but still fun, such as Peter, Petra, and Ptolemy. Though I think LeAnn Blasius offered my favorite, a clever portmanteau: Egypterosaur.

Plumage in Dino Poop

Everybody poops—even dinosaurs. When those droppings fossilize, they become time capsules called coprolites. Now, paleontologists excavating the Hell Creek Formation in Montana have found a feather preserved in dino feces, which, as National Geographic’s Riley Black reports, offers a rare look at a Cretaceous food web that included a medium-sized predator—possibly a juvenile T. rex or Nanotyrannus.

I reached out to Jingmai O’Connor, a paleontologist at the Field Museum in Chicago and lead author of the study, and she told me the stone stool contains “the best preserved Mesozoic feather known so far.”

But what animal did that feather belong to? You’ll have to read the story to find out.