Tyrannosaurus in popular culture

Tyrannosaurus rex is arguably the most prevalent dinosaur to appear in popular culture. It has been frequently represented in film and on television, in literature, and on the internet,.

A strip from Dinosaur Comics, a popular webcomic 

featuring an anthropomorphic Tyrannosaurus,.

General impact of Tyrannosaurus,

Tyrannosaurus rex is unique among dinosaurs in its place in modern culture; paleontologist Robert Bakker has called it "the most popular dinosaur among people of all ages, all cultures, and all nationalities". From the beginning, it was embraced by the public. Henry Fairfield Osborn, the President of the American Museum of Natural History, billed it the greatest hunter to have ever walked the earth. He stated in 1905,

“ I propose to make this animal the type of the new genus, Tyrannosaurus, in reference to its size, which far exceeds that of any carnivorous land animal hitherto described...This animals is in fact the ne plus ultra of the evolution of the large carnivorous dinosaurs: in brief it is entitled to the royal and high sounding group name which I have applied to it. ”

Tyrannosaurus gained widespread public attention on December 30, 1905, when the New York Times hailed T. rex as "the most formidable fighting animal of which there is any record whatever," the "king of all kings in the domain of animal life," "the absolute warlord of the earth," and a "royal man-eater of the jungle."  In 1906, Tyrannosaurus was dubbed the "prize fighter of antiquity" and the "Last of the Great Reptiles and the King of Them All."

In 1942, Charles R. Knight painted a mural incorporating Tyrannosaurus facing a Triceratops in the Field Museum of Natural History for the National Geographic Society, establishing the two dinosaurs as enemies in popular thought; paleontologist Phil Currie cites this mural as one of his inspirations to study dinosaurs. Bakker said of the imagined rivalry between Tyrannosaurus and Triceratops, "No matchup between predator and prey has ever been more dramatic. It’s somehow fitting that those two massive antagonists lived out their co-evolutionary belligerence through the very last days of the very last epoch of the Age of Dinosaurs,."

Tyrannosaurus Film appearances,

T. rex has played a major role in many films, starting with the classic monster movie King Kong, which featured a climactic battle between the giant ape and a Tyrannosaurus. The Tyrannosaurus model was made using a cast based on an early painting by Charles R. Knight. Willis O'Brien, the film's special effects director, stated that the battle between Kong and the Tyrannosaurus was one of the most technically difficult scene in the film to animate. Many early films depicted Tyrannosaurus with an upright posture based on the current thinking of the time. Most of these films inaccurately portrayed the dinosaur with three prominent fingers on each hand like Allosaurus (though Tyrannosaurus had a third, vestigial finger, it wouldn't have been noticeable at first glance); Walt Disney is reported to have informed dinosaur hunter Barnum Brown that "it looked better that way". Since that time, T. rex has appeared in a great number of "monster" films and educational documentaries.

One of the most iconic depictions of Tyrannosaurus in film was in 1993's Jurassic Park, where dinosaurs including T. rex are brought back to life using blood from fossilized mosquitoes. In the film, the dinosaur breaks free of its theme park enclosure, and proceeds to roam the park while killing some of the visitors and staff it encounters. The popularity of T. rex has long had a reciprocal effect on dinosaur science; the popularity of Jurassic Park factored into the discovery of the dinosaur genus Scipionyx; fossils of this genus had laid in storage in a basement in Italy until the film's release attracted attention from the fossil owner. The Tyrannosaurus reprised its role as the lead dinosaur in The Lost World, the sequel to Jurassic Park. Tyrannosaurus did not return as the lead dinosaur star in Jurassic Park III, and was instead replaced by Spinosaurus. However, it did appear briefly in a confrontation against Spinosaurus, only to be defeated.

The Toy Story series has a Tyrannosaurus character named Rex.

The lead character of the film Theodore Rex is an anthropomorphic Tyrannosaurus.

A Roger Corman film produced after Jurassic Park, Carnosaur, also featured a Tyrannosaurus, portrayed via a mix of suitimation, puppetry, and a life-size (but barely mobile) robot. The film spawned two sequels; stock footage of the T. rex was also used in the films Dinosaur Island, Raptor, and The Eden Formula.

Tyrannosaurus appeared in the Rite of Spring segment of the 1940 Disney film Fantasia. It terrorizes the other dinosaurs in the segment and engages a Stegosaurus in a battle that it wins. A Tyrannosaurus (it's unknown if this is the aforementioned Tyrannosaurus) is also seen near the end of the segment, collapsing into the desert-like landscape due to starvation and/or dehydration.

Among other appearances, Tyrannosaurus has made major appearances in many other films, including Dinosaurus!, The Last Dinosaur, The Land Before Time, Night at the Museum, Meet the Robinsons, and Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs. The IMAX 3D film T-Rex: Back to the Cretaceous featured a Tyrannosaurus in various time travel sequences, as well as its discoverer, Barnum Brown.

The fictional theropod Vastatosaurus rex, designed exclusively for Peter Jackson's 2005 remake of King Kong, is a hypothetical descendant of Tyrannosaurus,.

Tyrannosaurus Television appearances,

Tyrannosaurus has starred in several television series, including children's programs, both in those intended as fiction, and, more recently, documentaries.

In Barney & Friends, Barney is a stylized Tyrannosaurus Rex. In the Australian children's show The Wiggles, the character "Dorothy the Dinosaur" is a stylized adaptation of a Tyrannosaurus. Some Tyrannosaurus characters appear in Dinosaur Train.

Tyrannosaurus was one of several dinosaurs featured in the 1974 Doctor Who adventure Invasion of the Dinosaurs, starring Jon Pertwee.

It plays recurring supporting roles in Dinosaurs (Roy Hess, Earl Sinclair's friend and the Sinclairs's neighbor) and Land of the Lost, playing villain in both the 1974 series (as "Grumpy") and the 1991 version (as "Scarface", who had a scar covering his right eye, the result of a fight with a Parasaurolophus inferred from the pilot episode's prologue), Dinosaucers, as well as the TV anime Dinozaurs (as "Dino Tyranno" and his short-lived evil counterpart "Drago Tyran").

The dinosaur also appears in the shows Dinosaur King (as the Alpha Gang's Terry) and Dino Riders.

A T-Rex named "Ray" was the central antagonist is the claymation series Gogs.

The animated series, Dinosaucers featured anthropomorphic alien dinosaurs from the planet Reptilon. The Dinosaucers, the heroic protagonists of the show, possess the ability to "dinovolve" into their prehistoric counterparts while still retaining their human-level intelligence.

Documentaries and quasi-documentaries using Tyrannosaurus have included Dinosaur Planet, Prehistoric Park, T. Rex: New Science, New Beast, Dino-Riders, The Truth About Killer Dinosaurs, Walking with Dinosaurs, When Dinosaurs Roamed America, Sea Monsters, Valley of the T-Rex, Dinosaurs Decoded, Bizarre Dinosaurs, Animal Armageddon, Jurassic Fight Club,Dinolab, T-rex: Warrior or Wimp?, and T. Rex: A Dinosaur in Hollywood.

Other appearances include Mighty Morphin Power Rangers (its Japanese counterpart Kyōryū Sentai Zyuranger) and Power Rangers: Dino Thunder (its Japanese counterpart Bakuryū Sentai Abaranger).

Chomper from The Land Before Time (series), as well as Red Claw from the TV series, and Sharptooth from the original film are all tyrannosaurs.

Several Transformers characters, Grimlock and Megatron being the most well-known, turn into a T. rex as their alt-mode.

Tyrannomon, DarkTyrannomon, MetalTyrannomon, and MasterTyrannomon are dinosaur Digimon from Digimon: Digital Monsters named after Tyrannosaurus. Many other Digimon, such as Greymon, have designs that appear to draw from Tyrannosaurus.

The Pokémon Tyranitar is most likely named after Tyrannosaurus, and may be modeled after it as well,.

Tyrannosaurus Other appearances,

Tyrannosaurus on a German stamp

Tyrannosaurus has appeared in many media and is perhaps one of the most widely used dinosaurs in existence, and as such many products have been marketed using this dinosaur. Various incarnations of, and creatures based on T. rex have appeared in video games, and several game series have featured Tyrannosaurus a centerpiece. These include the Dino Crisis/Dino Stalker line, various Jurassic Park tie-in games, the Turok game series, the Zoo Tycoon series, and in Tomb Raider.

Full size animatronic Tyrannosaurus being assembled in Combe Martin Wildlife and Dinosaur Park, North Devon, England

Numerous models and children's toys depicting Tyrannosaurus have been produced, particularly in promotion of the Jurassic Park films. The Carnegie Museum Dinosaur Collection toy line released two versions of the dinosaur, with the second brought in line with more modern scientific understanding. Sinclair Oil ads from the 1950s frequently featured T. rex,and products from radio-controlled helicopter models to a rifle cartridge (the .577 T-Rex) have been named after the dinosaur. In music, the popular 1970s glam rock band T. Rex took their name from the famous dinosaur.

In literature, a dominant representation of Tyrannosaurus since 1990 has been that of Michael Crichton's, as seen in the novel Jurassic Park and its sequel The Lost World. Its skeleton was also used to illustrate the covers of these books. A Tyrannosaurus rex was the protagonist of the children's book We're Back! A Dinosaur's Story (later adapted into a feature-length film of the same name).

In the Calvin and Hobbes comics, fantasy sequences often featured Tyrannosaurus rex. In one story arc, in which Calvin writes a school paper on the T. rex predator/scavenger debate, he argues that T. rex was a predator because "They're so much cooler that way." T. rex is also featured as the protagonist in the long-running webcomic Dinosaur Comics by Ryan North.

Tyrannosaurs appear as antagonists several times in the real time strategy games Tiberium Dawn and Red Alert 2: Yuri's Revenge. They appear only in a secret campaign in the former, and as part of the main storyline in the latter.

A cartoon produced by Phoenix Games entitled Dinosaur Adventure has the protagionist, Tio, look like a T-Rex.

(source:wikipedia)