‘Tyrant Lizard Queen’ offers a nuanced look at T. rex

Martin’s Press, $29.00 Tyrannosaurus rex is the ultimate villain. Hollywood writers have pitted the ferocious dinosaur against King Kong or tasked it with terrorizing children in an SUV. And museum curators prop up casts of T. rex skeletons to show them mercilessly downing prey, thrilling millions of visitors around the world each year.

This 12-meter-long, eight-metric-ton carnivore needed to down nearly 150 kilograms of meat a day, often pulverizing and swallowing bones in the process. But in Tyrant Lizard Queen, paleontologist and science writer Riley Black asks readers to “consider the animal behind the kaiju-like façade.” Black enlists Snag, a fictional T. rex trying to survive in a forest set in prehistoric Utah. When we meet our heroine, she’s newly hatched and already under constant threat.

A pterosaur picks off four of her siblings and long-necked Alamosaurus threatens to trample her remaining kin. Tyrant Lizard Queen follows Snag through the pit stops typical in many coming-of-age stories: peer rivalries and first loves. Enter Sweet, a fellow female T. rex.

Their rivals-to-lovers arc sees the teen tyrants face off over food and later attempt mating, a clumsy encounter as awkward as any first kiss. When the eventual father of Snag’s brood turns on her in an attempt at cannibalism, the two team up to dispatch him. But it’s not just Snag’s relationship status that’s complicated.

The research behind how exactly a T. rex like Snag played, slept, fought and mated can be spotty, at best. After all, behaviors are difficult to capture in the fossil record. To fill these gaps, Black draws inspiration from modern animals, including crocodilians and flightless birds such as emus.

She outlines this process in the appendix, offering a behind-the-scenes look at how one brings the most feared yet beloved dinosaur to life. The killer queen we meet was 80 million years in the making, Black points out. The evolutionary journey from a pipsqueak skirting the edge of the food web to a dino monarch wasn’t easy.