The museum actually has two T. rex skeletons, the second and more complete of which now lords over the Hall of Saurischian Dinosaurs upstairs. Initially it was assembled to stand upright, tail dragging on the floor. It now appears in a more accurate stalking position, its spine roughly parallel to the floor, its skull dipped low enough to permit some nice dino selfies.

Now “T. rex: The Ultimate Predator,” a new exhibition that will run through the summer of 2020, gives an up-to-date view of everyone’s favorite prehistoric pugilist, and also introduces the many other tyrannosaurs that preceded T. rex, some discovered only this century in China and Mongolia. Along with a cast of the T. rex specimen upstairs, its bones rearranged into an alternative crouch, the museum is presenting a new full-size model of the emperor dinosaur, its head and tail dappled with — believe it! — soft, bristly white feathers.

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Claws and toe bones more than 60 million years old share space with facsimiles of the newest vintage; this is the first show for which the natural history museum has extensively used 3-D printing, not just traditional casting, to reproduce specimens in other collections. There’s also a mildly whiz-bang virtual reality game, which tasks you with reconstructing a T. rex skeleton. You’ll then cower in terror as it comes to life. It will delight older children, and enrage kids too young to wear the headsets.

T. rex emerged about 65 million years ago, at the very end of the Cretaceous. It lived on a planet of high temperatures, when the air was thick with carbon dioxide, and while some dinosaurs were content to munch grass, others would be happy to find a baby T. rex or two for hors d’oeuvres. An adorable model here of a young T. rex, hardly bigger than a Christmas goose, reveals just how hazardous dino-childhood would have been, and how quickly the species grew. Most T. rexes never made it past age 1, but those who did could later put on 100 pounds a month or more, maturing into an 18,000-pound tough guy, or girl. (There’s no saying what sex a T. rex is; fossils give few hints of whether a dinosaur was male or female, and some researchers question whether the limited number of specimens provides enough evidence to make sex distinctions.)