Palmyra alumnus screens ‘T. Rex’ documentary in Harrisburg theater

Andy Wood, a 1993 Palmyra graduate, is screening the documentary “T. Rex” as its senior vice president and producer. It’s available for audiences at the Whitaker Center’s Digital Cinema in Harrisburg.

Wood said his movie-making journey started in Palmyra, where he’d record and edit videos of himself and his friends skateboarding around Palmyra Middle School.

“My parents very graciously let me have the family camcorder,” Wood said. “So many a day for me was spent with my friends filming skateboarding stuff and going back to my room at night and editing those videos, so that’s sort of where the genesis of my passion for filmmaking started.”

He credited Richard Willis, his AP biology teacher, for getting him interested in biology and zoology. Wood went on to major in filmmaking and zoology at the University of Wisconsin.

He has now moved on to making educational documentaries, like “T. Rex,” which families can enjoy during museum visits.

Mentorship of the next generation was a theme of “T. Rex,” Wood said.

The story follows three young boys who regularly trekked through the North Dakota wilderness with their father or uncle, sending photos of fossils to their paleontologist family friend, Tyler Lyson. For a while, the fossils were not of dinosaurs.

That was, until the fall of 2022.

“The family stumbled on a big femur fossil eroding out of the ground, sent Tyler a photo of this, and Tyler was so happy for the first time to say this is the real deal,” Wood said. “It was the next summer — the summer of ’23 — that Tyler was able to pull an excavation team together and get permission from the Bureau of Land Management. Of course, the kids were a part of that every step of the way, so they got to participate in a real deal paleontology dig.”

The camera crew traveled to the state with the intention of recording the first couple of days of the dig.

Wood said they expected it to be a type of leaf-eating dinosaur, which are more often found in the region.

“We thought, ‘Let’s get the kids on camera, we’ll get the scientists doing what they do, and we’ll be able to build around that,’” he said.

But on the very first day, one of the kids discovered the sharp, meat-eating teeth of a young tyrannosaurus rex.

Wood said the team was lucky they had the camera rolling.

“We all had to very quickly make sure that we could dive out of the way of the cameras so that we weren’t ruining the moment, but it worked out great,” he said. “We hoped that the energy and the excitement of that moment come through in the film.”

They ended up staying to record for about three weeks and recorded the entire dig process.

There are more plant-eaters than predators in nature, making the find extra rare. Wood said there are even fewer youth T. rex fossils found, with this being one of only a handful of relatively complete specimens discovered.

The documentary said people might want to find the biggest dinosaur, but a young one can fill in gaps in scientific knowledge. There are still many mysteries about the lizard’s beginning and its transition from the size of a house cat to 40 feet long.

“There has never been, to date, a T. rex baby or nest found,” Wood said. “Juveniles are very rare, and so scientists are really excited about discoveries like this one because it’ll tell us a lot about how this animal may have grown up. It’s going to answer a lot of questions as this specimen continues to be studied.”

The fossil is currently in Denver, being extracted from the jacket of plaster used to protect it during transportation. The documentary ends with the mass of rock being carried from its resting place, but Wood said they continue to post updates about the process on social media.

Beyond the team’s discovery, the documentary also discusses how the T. rex has become a cultural icon, being the big, bad monster in movies. They call it the G.O.A.T. — the Greatest Of All Tyrants.

“T. Rex” showtimes are available online. The film is listed as showing through 2025.