The Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History has received a gift that will be hard to outdo this holiday season — a nearly complete dinosaur skull.
It’s a gift that will keep on giving, as the public has a chance to see the approximately 67-million-year-old fossil from Dec. 22 to Dec. 28 (minus Christmas Day, when the museum is closed).
Eric Schmidt, the former CEO of Google, and his wife Wendy purchased and donated the “remarkably complete” skull of Pachycephalosaurus, a dinosaur the Smithsonian said is famed for its domed head. The species roamed the earth alongside the most renowned dinosaurs, such as the Tyrannosaurus rex and Triceratops, at the end of the Cretaceous Period.
The skull will make its temporary debut at the museum before it joins the permanent fossil exhibition in the coming years, the Smithsonian said in a news release.
“This skull is by far the most spectacular specimen of this type of dinosaur that we have at the museum,” paleontologist Matthew Carrano, the museum’s curator of Dinosauria, said in the release. “We almost never get to see the animal’s face or the teeth or other parts of the head because they usually have broken away.”
Researchers unearthed the skull in South Dakota in 2024, before the Schmidts purchased it at auction and donated it to the museum. According to Carrano, it’s one of very few known Pachycephalosaurus skulls that’s nearly complete and it probably represents a dinosaur that was not quite fully grown when it died.
“Examining this skull and comparing it to other pachycephalosaur skulls will provide insights into how these dinosaurs changed as they grew,” the museum said in its news release.
The scientific name Pachycephalosaurus means “thickheaded lizard.” The animals grew up to 15 feet in length.
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