AUSTIN, Texas — Early one morning in downtown Austin, the exhibition hall at the Bullock Texas State History Museum hums with quiet focus.
Visitors come face-to-face with a life-size Tyrannosaurus rex towering over the Bullock Museum gallery. | Credit: Bullock Texas State History Museum
A crew stands beneath a massive frame, guiding a life-size T. rex skull into place.
It’s not bone but a meticulously crafted replica, the final piece in a prehistoric puzzle weeks in the making.
With the last bolt secured, the king of the dinosaurs once again towers over his domain.
“It’s such a unique look at one of the most iconic dinosaurs in history,” says James McReynolds, a curator at the Bullock Museum, standing beside the newly completed display. “T. rex: The Ultimate Predator gives people a chance to see just how much we’ve learned about these incredible animals.”
Families explore fossils, skeletons, and digital displays that bring the prehistoric world to life. | Credit: Bullock Texas State History Museum
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Step inside and you’re transported 66 million years back in time.
The gallery is filled with life-size models, fossils, and digital interactives that trace the T. rex’s journey from small, feathered hatchling to apex predator.
A detailed model of a four-year-old T. rex shows the predator’s early feathers and developing power. | Credit: Bullock Texas State History Museum
“The oldest known T. rex was only 28 years old,” McReynolds explains.
This model here is of a four-year-old T. rex, still with feathers, but already massive.
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The exhibit reminds visitors that while the T. rex’s reign was short, its impact was monumental.
In less than three decades of life, it grew from turkey-sized hatchling to towering carnivore, its bones revealing secrets about how it hunted, ate, and ruled its prehistoric world.
The exhibition traces the T. rex’s 100-million-year evolution from small, birdlike ancestors to apex hunter. | Credit: Bullock Texas State History Museum
Advances in technology have also deepened the mystery and the fascination.
Using CT scans, brain endocasts, and computer modeling, scientists are reimagining the life of the T. rex in greater detail than ever before.
“We now know things about its sense of smell and vision that we didn’t know before,” McReynolds says.
We can even model its bite force, and it turns out it had the strongest bite of any creature, living or extinct.
While the Bullock’s exhibition doesn’t include Texas fossils, curator McReynolds notes a meaningful local connection.
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In 1970, University of Texas researchers uncovered part of a T. rex jawbone in Big Bend National Park, one of the few such finds ever made in the state.
Decades later, another UT-led expedition unearthed a fragment of a leg bone from the same region.
Those discoveries, now housed at the Texas Natural History Museum on the UT Austin campus, helped scientists imagine what a Texas-born T. rex might have looked like.
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“Hopefully some of the thousands of kids that come through here will be the next generation of paleontologists,” McReynolds says, “the ones who help us learn even more.”
Visitors come face-to-face with a life-size Tyrannosaurus rex towering over the Bullock Museum gallery. | Credit: Bullock Texas State History Museum
To make the exhibit accessible to all, the Bullock Museum has partnered with Bloomberg Connects to reproduce T. rex: The Ultimate Predator in English and Spanish through a digital guide.
Visitors can explore high-resolution images, use screen reader tools, and translate text into more than 40 languages.
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For McReynolds, that blend of storytelling, technology, and curiosity is exactly the point.
Step inside Austin’s Bullock Museum as T. rex takes over | CBS Austin
“T. rex has become the most famous dinosaur in the world,” he says.
But it’s also become the best-researched. There’s still so much more to uncover.
T. rex: The Ultimate Predator is on view now at the Bullock Texas State History Museum in Austin.
Visitors come face-to-face with a life-size Tyrannosaurus rex towering over the Bullock Museum gallery. | Credit: Bullock Texas State History Museum
The exhibition was organized by the American Museum of Natural History, New York.
Bullock Museum Hours:
Monday – Sunday, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m.Bullock Museum exhibitions are closed on Thanksgiving, Christmas Day, New Year’s Day, and Easter. The IMAX Theatre is closed on select holidays; please check the Museum calendar for details.
Visitors come face-to-face with a life-size Tyrannosaurus rex towering over the Bullock Museum gallery. | Credit: Bullock Texas State History Museum
EDITOR NOTE: #TBT or Turning Back Time is an award-winning series of stories by CBS Austin This Morning Anchor John-Carlos Estrada. The series will focus on the history of Central Texas and its impact on the community. If you want to share a story idea with him, email him (jcestrada@cbsaustin.com) or message him on social media via Facebook, Twitter, TikTok, BlueSky, or Instagram.