Hunting the T-rex on Montana's Dinosaur Trail

GET up-close and personal with the real T-rex on a dinosaur trail of Montana.

A replica cast of the Peck's Rex skull and the complete Peck's Rex replica at Montana's Dinosaur Trail / AAP

LIFE for poor old Leonardo was nasty, brutish and short.

About 77 million years ago the juvenile duckbill dinosaur was attacked on the plains of what is now known as Montana, US, by a pack of Jurassic predators.

Fatally wounded, the young Brachylophosaurus struggled to the edge of an inland sea, where he sank into the soft sand and died.

The salt water mummified him, preserving the wrinkles and scales on his skin and even his last meal of conifers and magnolia-like plants.

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He remained buried until he was discovered north of Malta, in central Montana, in 2000.

Named after graffiti carved in a nearby rock, Leonardo is now a worldwide palaeontological star and a leading attraction at the Great Plains Dinosaur Museum in Malta, one of the stops along Montana's so-called Dinosaur Trail.

The Dinosaur Trail links together a series of dinosaur-related museums, laboratories and archaeological sites including the Great Plains Museum.

The idea of a dinosaur trail was dreamed up by local tourism authorities who wanted to capitalise on the state's wealth of fossil resources.

And Montana has plenty.

Courtney Moles, the general manager of the Great Plains Museum, says dinosaur digs began in Montana in the late 1800s but the state didn't get to keep a specimen until the 1960s.

The museum was set up in 2003.

"It was formed by local community members who decided we have a lot of awesome dinosaur specimens, and we needed a place to keep them and where people can see them,'' Moles says.

As well as Leonardo, the museum houses the bones of Roberta, another Brachylophosaurus, and Ralph, a possible new species of sauropod.

Also on display is Giffen, the northern-most stegosaurus ever discovered. Giffen was found in 1997 by a local family who were building a retaining wall on their dam.

They originally thought the piece of bone they found was a curious rock and used it as a doorstop for four years.

"But as they found more they realised, they had a dinosaur,'' Moles says.

Home of the Tyrannosaurus rex
Visitors to the museum are able to hold and handle this 150 million year old fragment of dinosaur.

Great Plains is one of the few dinosaur museums in the world where you can do this, Moles says adding, ``We're not worried about it being damaged - it was a doorstop, after all.''

Another stop on the trail is the Fort Peck Dinosaur Museum, an architecturally impressive building located next to the Fort Peck Dam in Fort Peck, Montana, which opened in 2005.

Only about 40 Tyrannosaurus rex have ever been found, most of them in Montana.

One of these is the so-called Peck's Rex, a replica of a dinosaur found in 1997 30km southeast of the museum (the original fossils are kept in a sealed vault).

Montana is ideal for finding dinosaurs, says Fort Peck ranger Michele Fromdahl.

"It's not that there were more dinosaurs here, it's just that conditions at the time were perfect for preserving them.

"It was a swamp then but it's really arid and dry now, which makes it perfect for discovering dinosaurs. The terrain was perfect then and it's perfect now.''

People have an inherent fascination with dinosaurs, Fromdahl says.

"Part of it's their size, they're just so big. And they're just not around anymore.''

Fromdahl says the Peck's Rex is unusual because he is believed to be 65-75 per cent intact. It's thought that Rex may have had an arthritic jaw or suffered a fatal mouth infection, something of a liability for a T-rex, and starved to death.

Rex is also holding clues for palaeontologists at the University of New Orleans who are studying evidence to suggest that dinosaurs were left and right handed.

The writer was a guest of United Airlines Australia and Visit Montana.

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