Update
[Posted 20 Jan 1998]
On Oct. 4, 1997, Sue was finally sold at auction -- for an astounding $8.36 million dollars. The lucky -- and deep-pocketed -- buyer was the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago. While scientists were delighted that the relics went to a science institution, not a private collector, they also worried that the sale would jack up prices for other noteworthy fossils. "Everything changed on that day," J. Keith Rigby Jr., a paleontologist at University of Notre Dame, told Science News (13 Dec. 1997, p. 382). "This sale may be the single most damaging action in the history of vertebrate paleontology."
An unwelcome welcome
When Sue, a Tyrannosaurus rex, was discovered in South Dakota in 1990, the stunningly complete fossil promised to be a treasure-trove for science. Instead, the old bones have been fought over like a more prosaic treasure. Instead of being measured in terms of knowledge about prehistory, and about the captivating top carnivore of the Cretaceous Era (defined), Sue is being measured in dollar terms. In fact, scientists have barely studied Sue, since her fossil remains have been locked in a garage since 1992. Is that any way to welcome a big, bad dinosaur who's waited a gezillion years to see the light of day?
Even a cursory examination of the world's most complete T. rex reveals
an interesting history. No stranger to conflict, her tail had been broken,
perhaps by a rival or an amorous mate. Her ribs were bruised and infected.
They even contained a T. rex tooth, convincing evidence of an altercation
with a fellow rex.
You think it was a picnic, this business of being the
toughest carnivore in history?
Think again. Sue didn't have a death certificate (at least, none
was found), but that hole in her skull certainly does not signify brain
surgery. Sue was apparently killed by a fellow rex chomping on her head.
A T. rex skeleton hunts at sundown, © Ed Gerken/Black Hills Institute.
Still, these dinosaurian disputes seem to pale beside the legal, political
and scientific fracas that has swirled around Sue since she emerged from
the rock roughly 65 million years after she croaked on the shores of the
Cretaceous seaway (defined).
It was in 1990 that Sue Hendrickson, an employee of the Black Hills
Institute of Geological Research, Inc., noticed certain bones sticking
up from the ground. The institute, a fossil collection and preparation
firm in Hill City, South Dakota, has sold fossils to universities, museums
and fossil merchants for 23 years.
Hendrickson told the Institute's president, paleontologist (defined)
and fossil collector Peter Larson, about the bones. Larson contacted Maurice
Williams, the Sioux Indian who owns the land where Sue kicked the bucket
(defined) back at the end of the Cretaceous,
and paid him $5,000 for the right to unearth and remove the skeleton.
A pretty good deal for Larson, but a bad one for Williams, observes Peter
Sheehan, geology curator at the Milwaukee Public Museum.
No ordinary top carnivore
Rex is tall -- had anybody been building homes, she could have spied
her prey through a second-story window.
Sue was big, she was female, and she was, most important, relatively
complete. Most dinosaurs are known from extremely fragmentary remains
-- the odd rib here, a few vertebrae (defined)
there, some teeth and maybe the skull if you're lucky. Those fragmentary
remains leave considerable room for debate (something paleontologists
love as much as the next scientist) about what the animal actually looked
like. Sometimes, the fragmentary remains of different animals are jumbled
together (all the better to confuse you with, my dear).
Sue was the first in a remarkable series of recent discoveries of
monstrous meat-munching dinosaurs.
It quickly became clear to Larson, who had excavated three previous T.
rexes, that Sue was no ordinary wreck of a rex. And that was important,
since, as any 6-year-old can tell you, Tyrannosaurus rex is no ordinary
dinosaur. About 45 feet long from stem to stern, with a mouthful of serrated
fangs measuring as long as five inches, it has two prehistoric (naturally)
looking armlets up front and pillar-sized stumps for legs in back.
