Across 2.4 million years, roughly 2.5 billion Tyrannosaurus rex walked the ancient landscapes of North America — yet only 32 well-preserved specimens survive in museums today, one for every 80 million animals that lived and died. A 2021 Berkeley study, led by Charles Marshall, placed this vanishing act in precise numerical terms, reminding us that the fossil record is not a library but a lottery. What paleontology has managed to reconstruct from so fragmentary a foundation is less a testament to what was lost than to the extraordinary discipline of reasoning carefully from almost nothing.