The Rock’s viral moment during NFL playoffs helps dino expert crack T-Rex mystery

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An NFL playoff game between the eventual Super Bowl-champion Los Angeles Rams and the Arizona Cardinals and the appearance of Dwyane "The Rock" Johnson helped set the stage to solve one of the biggest recent mysteries in the paleontology community: finding out where a 66-million-year-old Tyrannosaurus Rex fossil nicknamed Stan had been shipped off to after its purchase in 2020.

Of course, there’s a backstory here.

Amateur paleontologist Stan Sacrison in 1987 first discovered the T-Rex in South Dakota and it wasn’t 1992 when the Black Hills Institute started to excavate the dinosaur. It took about 30,000 hours for the fossil to be completely excavated and it was at the Black Hills museum for years until a legal dispute between two of the company’s largest shareholders resulted in a judge ordering the fossil’s sale in 2018.

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In 2020, the Tyrannosaurus Rex was sold for an astronomical $31.8 million at a Christie’s auction. However, the buyer of the fossil was shrouded in mystery.

Enter "The Most Electrifying Man in Sports Entertainment."

Dwayne Johnson, aka The Rock, enters the ring to talk smack about his upcoming opponent John Cena during the WWE Raw event at Rose Garden arena in Portland, Oregon, Feb. 27, 2012. (Chris Ryan/Corbis via Getty Images)

Johnson appeared on an episode of the "Manningcast" during the playoff game on ESPN back in January. While he casually talked about football and his upcoming XFL reboot, Eli Manning asked him about the skull.

"I got a T-Rex skull. That’s Stan. As a matter of fact, so Stan was the most complete T-Rex skull ever found by a paleontologist, a young