Tuesday is Dino-day at Chicago’s O’Hare Airport

At Chicago’s O’Hare Airport (ORD), it is hard to miss the model of the four-story high, 72-foot-long Brachiosaurus skeleton on loan from Chicago’s Field Museum of Natural History that stands guard on the upper level of Terminal 1 in Concourse B.

But on Tuesday there will be a party at ORD for a real dinosaur skeleton.

Trix, a 66 million-year-old female Tyrannosaurus rex fossil excavated in Montana in 2013, will board a KLM flight to Amsterdam’s Schiphol Airport and then take up residence at the Naturalis Biodiversity Center, a museum in nearby Leiden.

Starting Sept. 10, Trix will become the first T. rex skeleton permanently exhibited in a museum in mainland Europe. She is otherwise notable because the “quality of this fossil is unmatched by any other large T. rex find,” said Anne Schulp, the paleontologist who is head of T. rex research at Naturalis.

Trix has more than 80% of her bone volume, placing her in the top 3 rankings of the most complete T. rex skeletons in the world, said Schulp. For the trip to the Netherlands all 13,000 pounds of Trix’s bones will be carefully packed into small crates that will then be tucked inside bigger crates.

“The small crates are filled with what we lovingly call 'museum foam’ that has perfectly measured holes in which the individual bones fit exactly,” said Schulp. “They are packed entirely shockproof so that, even after a turbulent flight, the bones still look their best when they come out of the crates.”

At Tuesday’s send off for Trix, passengers in ORD's International Terminal 5 will be able to watch the crates get loaded onto the airplane and witness the KLM pilot making sure Trix’s giant Dutch passport is in order. Passengers will also able to get their photos taken with the T. rex (on a green screen) and pick up T. rex tattoos and stickers.

“A skeleton of more than 40 feet high and 66 million years old is a proper symbol for the width and the depth of the scientific bonds between our two countries,” said Louis Piet, Chicago Consul General of the Royal Kingdom of the Netherlands, “and its departure from Chicago is therefore an opportunity to call attention to this cooperation.”

Harriet Baskas is a Seattle-based airports and aviation writer and Paste BN Travel's "At the Airport" columnist. She occasionally contributes to Ben Mutzabaugh's Today in the Sky blog. Follow her at twitter.com/hbaskas.