Dinosaurs: Age of the giant lizards

The new special exhibition Dinosaurs! lets visitors discover dinosaurs from the three geological eras Triassic, Jurassic and Cretaceous for the first time.

Dinosaurs were an incredibly successful group of animals. They populated our planet for more than 150 million years, with their reign spanning three geological eras: Triassic, Jurassic and Cretaceous. They survived one of the five great mass extinctions and adapted to changing environmental conditions. The end of their reign came suddenly and occurred 66 million years ago.

In December 2015 Tristan Otto came to Europe and to the Museum für Naturkunde in Berlin as the first original T. rex skeleton. Tristan Otto is thus one of the few original T. rex skeletons outside North America. Between June 2020 and December 2021, the T. rex was on display at the Natural History Museum in Copenhagen and is now back again in Berlin.

The twelve meters long and four meters high skeleton of the predatory dinosaur from the Upper Cretaceous period is 66 million years old. Its night-black colour is characteristic of fossils from the so-called Hell Creek Formation, a fossil-rich rock layer in the US state of Montana, where the T. rex was found in 2010. Like Tristan Otto, all previous T. rex finds originate from North America. The recovery and preservation of the bones took a total of four years. Tristan Otto is one of the best-preserved Tyrannosaurus rex specimens worldwide, with an almost completely preserved skull. He is named after the sons of the two owners.