Behold a T-Rex holotype, paleontology's "gold standard"

Short Wave

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Science, News, Nature, Astronomy, Daily News, Life Sciences

4.7 • 6K Ratings

🗓️ 6 January 2026

⏱️ 13 minutes

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Summary

What happens behind the scenes of a dinosaur exhibit? Short Wave host Regina Barber got to find out … by taking a trip to the Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh. In the museum’s basement, she talked to a paleobiologist, checked out a farmland fossil find and even touched a 67 million-year-old bone. Because, as it turns out, there’s a lot of science that can be found in a museum basement.

Learn more about the Carnegie Museum of Natural History’s exhibit “The Stories We Keep”.

Interested in more archaeology and dino-related science? Email us your question at [email protected].

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Public media counts on your support to ensure that the reporting and programs you depend on thrive.
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0:16.8	So start supporting what you love today at plus.npr.org.
0:24.2	You're listening to Shortwave from NPR.
0:29.7	This summer I got to go on a grown-up field trip.
0:33.4	I got in my car and I drove a little over four hours to the Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh.
0:39.5	I was so excited to learn about dinosaurs.
0:42.8	And I'm not the only one.
0:44.2	People have been coming to this museum since 1895 to see all the dinosaur bones on display.
0:49.2	Most of what you see in the dinosaur gallery are real fossils.
0:52.2	So there's about roughly 250 specimens on display and about 75% of dinosaur gallery are real fossils. So there's about, you know, roughly 250 specimens
0:55.0	on display, and about 75% of those are the actual fossils. That's Matt LaManna, the curator of
1:00.7	vertebrate paleontology at the museum. He'd just come back from a dig in Wyoming, and he was
1:05.3	nice enough to walk me through the dino exhibit when I first arrived. So, um, not all the creatures
1:10.7	that you see in here are dinosaurs.
1:12.1	Those two are and that one is.
1:14.0	But this guy is a crack relative.
1:15.9	Almost immediately, I was in awe.
1:18.0	The ceilines were high.
1:19.1	The plastic greenery was lush.
1:21.2	And the pieced together dinosaur bones, they towered over me.
1:24.9	It's so big.
	...

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