Tyrannosaurus Sue-- The Extraordinary Saga of the Largest, Most Fought Over T. Rex Ever Found

by Steve Fiffer

  Larson remembers. "I'd say, 'We're gonna get you out of here, Sue. Be

  patient. Everything's going to be okay.'"

  Larson, w h o was in his early forties, did not expect Sue, a 67-mil-

  lion-year-old Tyrannosaurus rex, to respond. Dinosaurs talk only in

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  2 TYRANNOSAURUS S U E

  movies or on television or in t h e m e parks. Still, something in his bones

  told the paleontologist that he had to reassure Sue that she would sur-

  vive this ordeal, this indignity, just as she had survived n u m e r o u s bat-

  tles with other dinosaurs while alive, just as her skeleton had survived

  millennia u p o n millennia of climactic change and chaos virtually

  intact.

  Only 11 other Tyrannosaurus rex had ever been discovered. She was

  the find of his life, the find of anyone's life—the largest, most complete

  (90 percent) T. rex ever unearthed. And while she could not talk, she had

  been telling him remarkable stories over the 21 m o n t h s since his col-

  league Sue Hendrickson had first spotted her on August 12, 1990.

  Her bones offered clues to determining her sex and the sex of other

  dinosaurs, as well as the usefulness of their upper appendages. Her fibu-

  la, which had been broken a n d then healed over, seemed to indicate that

  she had survived a crippling injury that would have rendered her unable

  to fend for herself for a lengthy period of time. Her partially damaged

  skull indicated that she may have lost her life in combat. Foreign

  remains in her midsection even revealed her last supper before d e a t h —

  a duck-billed dinosaur. So to Larson, w h o had known he was going to

  be a paleontologist since he had found his first fossil at age 4, Sue was

  alive in her own way. She had a name, she had a personality, a n d she had

  a history. She was, to h i m at least, priceless.

  As he took the p o d i u m at Sotheby's New York in midtown M a n h a t t a n

  on October 4, 1997, David Redden, the auction house's executive vice

  president, had no idea what price Lot 7045 would c o m m a n d . Nothing

  like this had ever been found, m u c h less sold or auctioned, in the 253

  years Sotheby's had been in business. But Redden, an unflappable Brit

  w h o has auctioned off everything from Mozart manuscripts to m o o n

  rocks, knew that the world would soon k n o w the exact monetary value

  of the lot described in the Sotheby's catalog as a "highly i m p o r t a n t and

  virtually complete fossil skeleton of a Tyrannosaurus rex . . . popularly

  k n o w n as Sue." Bidding was to begin at $500,000.

  Watching eagerly from a private r o o m overlooking the standing-

  r o o m - o n l y crowd of 300 on the auction floor, Maurice Williams, the

  Native American w h o had consigned Sue to Sotheby's, was hoping for at

  P R O L O G U E 3

  least $1 million. D o w n on the floor itself, Sue Hendrickson prayed that

  it wouldn't get m u c h higher than that. She knew that Peter Larson had

  a representative in the r o o m with limited resources.

  In the five and one-half years since the government had seized the

  dinosaur from him, Larson had exhausted his emotional and financial

  resources to get her back. His passion for Sue, he believed, had led to a

  vendetta by the federal government that put him behind bars for almost

  two years. Unable to attend the auction because he was u n d e r " h o m e

  confinement" after his recent release from prison, the paleontologist

  was monitoring the proceedings via telephone.

  A trio representing Chicago's Field M u s e u m — R i c h a r d Gray, John

  W. McCarter, Jr., and Peter Crane—was also participating by p h o n e ,

  albeit one almost within shouting distance of Redden. Fearing that

  competitors' awareness of their interest in Sue might drive up the price,

  they had slipped unseen into another private r o o m at Sotheby's just

  before the auction was to begin. They would c o m m u n i c a t e their bids by

  hotline to the house's president, Diana "Dede" Brooks, w h o was situat-

  ed below the p o d i u m to R e d d e n s left.

  Less secretive than the Chicagoans but equally prepared for the

  hunt, representatives of several other m u s e u m s as well as private foun-

  dations and wealthy individuals sat or stood on the floor, their

  weapons—small blue auction paddles—poised.

  The United States government, which also had once laid claim to

  Sue, would not be bidding by paddle or p h o n e . T h e government didn't

  care w h o in particular m a d e the highest offer, but federal fingers were

  crossed hoping that the winner would keep the dinosaur in America. If

  some private collector or institution from Asia or Europe prevailed and

  took Sue overseas, Washington would be wiping the egg off its face for

  years to come.

  "Good m o r n i n g , ladies and gentlemen," Redden began. "We have

  for auction today the fossil of the T. rex k n o w n as Sue." T h e auctioneer

  tilted his head to the right, where Sue—or at least her chocolate-brown,

  5-foot-long, 6 0 0 - p o u n d skull—sat on a long white cushion.

  O n e of the world's foremost paleontologists, Dr. Robert Bakker,

  enamored by Sue's charisma, once described her as the "Marlene

  Dietrich of fossils." Sotheby's seemed to be treating her m o r e like

  4

  TYRANNOSAURUS S U E

  M a d o n n a than Marlene, a rock star rather than a chanteuse. Her image

  was posted on a huge screen above the stage, and a bodyguard stood by

  her side.

  Redden took a deep breath, brought his gavel down, and the music

  began.

  1

  IT M U S T BE A T. REX

  "Five hundred thousand dollars," said Redden. He let the figure

  roll off his tongue slowly. The surreal nature of the moment

  hadn't escaped him. The bidding had begun, and he and a

  dinosaur named Sue had entered the kind of Salvador Dali

  landscape you might expect to find on the Sotheby's auction

  block.

  If the tire hadn't gone flat, if the fog hadn't lifted, if the dinosaur hadn't

  been calling, Sue Hendrickson might never have found her. A Tyran-

  nosaurus rex calling across 7 miles of rugged rock a n d barren prairie,

  across 67 million years of time? Hendrickson, of all people, can't explain

  it.

  "I'm a very analytical person. I don't believe in fate," she says as she

  checks her mud-spattered gray backpack to make sure that she has

  everything she needs to go hunting for dinosaurs on a w a r m , cloudless,

  late-summer day in South Dakota. Her eyes as blue as the Great Plains

  sky, her face as resolute and weathered as the badlands she will soon be

  traversing, Hendrickson wears the same outfit she wore when she found

  Sue almost a decade earlier in this same fossil-rich formation—blue

  jeans, blue workshirt, and brown hiking boots. A silver-colored pick

  hangs from a leather belt a r o u n d her waist like a six-shooter. Her h u n t -

  ing companion, a striking golden retriever n a m e d Skywalker, sits at

  attention by her side.

  5

  6

  TYRANNOSAURUS S U E

  A field paleontologist since the mid-1980s, Hendrickson
is nothing if

  not d o w n to earth. It is past ages, not the New Age, that move her. She

  searches for fossils, not herself. And yet

  "For two weeks this dinosaur was doing something to me, calling

  me. I didn't actually hear voices. But something kept pulling me there.

  Something wanted it to be me that went there and found her."

  (Paleontologist Robert Bakker is not surprised when he hears this.

  "There's no such thing as an atheist in a dinosaur quarry," he laughs.)

  It was August of 1990. Hendrickson, Larson, and other members of a

  team from the Black Hills Institute of Geological Research, a commercial

  fossil-hunting enterprise based in Hill City, South Dakota, were conclud-

  ing a month's stay at the Ruth Mason Dinosaur Quarry near the small

  town of Faith in the northwest corner of the state. This was the fourth

  s u m m e r that Hendrickson had worked with the team. She had joined

  them after a spring spent searching for amber in the Dominican Republic.

  Paleontology is only one of Hendrickson's passions. She is, perhaps,

  the world's leading procurer of amber and has been an underwater diver

  on expeditions that have found the lost city of Alexandria, Egypt, sub-

  merged by an earthquake and tidal wave in the fifth century; sixteenth-

  century Spanish galleons that sank off Cuba a n d the Philippines; and

  Napoleonic ships sent to the floor of the Nile by Admiral Nelson's fleet

  in 1798. "Sue is like Indiana Jones, an intrepid globetrotter," says Dr.

  David Grimaldi, C h a i r m a n of the American M u s e u m of Natural

  History's D e p a r t m e n t of Entomology.

  Hendrickson was b o r n with what she calls "itchy feet and the

  instinct to r o a m " in 1949 in—where else?—Indiana. A voracious read-

  er, she devoured Dostoyevski by the time she was 11. Her mother, Mary,

  a retired school teacher, remembers her as a determined, intellectually

  curious girl, "who was too bright and too far ahead to fit in . . . a square

  peg in a r o u n d hole."

  Hendrickson agrees that she had a hard time belonging after she

  reached high school in the middle-class town of Munster. At 16, she

  would tell her parents that she was going to a friend's house. Instead

  she'd make the half-hour drive across the state line to Chicago, where

  she'd listen to folk music in the city's Old Town section or sit out on Navy

  Pier and wish she were far away. "Typical teenage depression," she laughs.

  "I was bored. I hated my high school and I hated my hometown."

  IT M U S T BE A T. REX 7

  After several nasty clashes, m o t h e r and daughter agreed that a

  change of scenery was needed. Hendrickson moved in with her aunt

  and uncle in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida, for her senior year of high school.

  When they grounded her for staying out all night, she ran away with her

  boyfriend. "He liked to dive and I loved the water, so o u r plan was to

  work on a shrimp boat in Lafitte, Louisiana," Hendrickson says. On

  their first night there, however, a d r u n k e n local followed her out of a bar

  and tried to rape her.

  Although she escaped the attack u n h a r m e d , Hendrickson had no

  desire to stay in the bayou country. She and her boyfriend took off, and

  for the next few years they crisscrossed the country, living and working

  odd jobs in cities from Boston to San Francisco, where, d o w n to her last

  36 cents, Hendrickson pawned her gold watch for $20. They finally

  decided to anchor themselves in the marina at San Rafael, California.

  Hendrickson, w h o had called her parents immediately after she ran

  away and had visited them in Munster, asked her father to loan her the

  d o w n payment on a 30-foot sailboat. He did. Soon she a n d her boy-

  friend were earning a living painting and varnishing the boats of their

  wealthy neighbors in the marina.

  Two years later, the couple split up. Long fascinated by tropical fish,

  Hendrickson headed to Florida after learning that divers were often need-

  ed to catch m u s e u m and h o m e aquarium specimens. She dove for a year

  in Key West, then moved to Seattle, where her parents had relocated.

  Now 21, she contemplated college for the first time since running

  away. She passed the GED high school equivalency test and talked with

  the chairman of the Marine Biology Department at the University of

  Washington. "I asked him what I would get for seven years of study (need-

  ed to earn an undergraduate degree and PhD)," she recalls. "He said I

  could probably dissect fish or take pollution counts. I decided I could just

  go back and do what all the other PhDs were doing: catch tropical fish."

  After working as a sail maker for a year, she returned to Florida.

  In 1973, while visiting diver friends in Key West, Hendrickson was

  asked to help salvage a sunken freighter. "It was very hard work," she

  says. "But I liked the challenge." Over the next few years, she helped raise

  sunken planes and boats. She earned additional m o n e y diving for lob-

  sters and selling t h e m to local restaurants. Her best haul: 492 lobsters in

  one day.

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  TYRANNOSAURUS S U E

  Hendrickson remembers that long before being pulled to the

  dinosaur, she had a knack for finding things. "I don't know if it's a sixth

  sense or luck, b u t there's something going on. W h e n I'm attuned to

  something I'm looking for, I find it. Sometimes when I'd be looking for

  lobsters or seashells, I'd just stop my boat and say, 'This feels good.' I

  couldn't see a thing. I'd drop anchor in 30 feet, dive down, and there was

  the shell. It would blow me away. There was no sensory perception. I

  couldn't smell it or see it."

  Hendrickson fell in love with the Dominican Republic while diving

  with a team of m a r i n e archaeologists there in 1974. She returned when-

  ever she could. Always looking for new adventures, on one visit she went

  in search of the a m b e r mines she had heard about from the locals. In the

  m o u n t a i n s , miners showed her their treasures—golden-hued lumps

  formed from prehistoric resins that imprisoned perfectly preserved

  scorpions, beetles, termites, and other insects. "It was amazing," says

  Hendrickson. "It was like seeing a whole other world, a window to the

  past."

  On subsequent visits she tried digging in the m o u n t a i n caves, but,

  she says, "It wasn't efficient. You could dig for years and never find an

  insect in amber." Instead, she began paying the miners for specimens.

  She didn't have to pay m u c h at first—$10 to $35 per piece—because

  there was only minimal d e m a n d for such fossils.

  At the time, most of the world's a m b e r came from the Baltic Sea

  area (as it still does). Thus Hendrickson, w h o had become proficient in

  Spanish during her travels, was able to get in on the ground floor when

  she decided to supply specimens from Central America to m u s e u m s

  and private collectors. In the mid-1980s, she began buying amber from

  miners in Chiapas, Mexico, as well.

  M u s e u m s a r o u n d the world study and display amber found by

  Hendrickson. "She has the nose for procuring pieces of big impact," says


  Dr. Robert K. Robbins, Curator of Entomology at the Smithsonian

  Institution. He cites o n e of the Smithsonian Insect Zoo's prize posses-

  sions, an extinct Antilles butterfly suspended in amber. Only six butter-

  flies in a m b e r have ever been found (three by Hendrickson), and, says

  Robbins, "This one is probably the best. You can even see the tiny hairs

  that served as its taste buds."

  IT M U S T BE A T. REX 9

  Hendrickson sells some a m b e r pieces to private collectors, b u t she

  always offers her scientifically i m p o r t a n t finds to m u s e u m s — a t cost.

  Such generosity leads Bakker to observe, "Sue is the late twentieth-cen-

  tury equivalent of Alfred Russel Wallace." Like Wallace, the nineteenth-

  century British naturalist and explorer w h o independently reached the

  same theory of evolution as Darwin, Hendrickson seems motivated not

  by the desire for fame or fortune, but by a selfless "desire to share the

  earth's natural wonders," says Bakker.

  Hendrickson describes herself in simpler terms. "I'm just a person

  who loves finding things a n d learning everything about them," she says,

  adding that she has little interest in possessing them. "It's the thrill of

  discovery. It's like the high from s o m e drug. It lasts a few minutes. And

  it's addictive." She smiles. "Those m o m e n t s are few a n d far between, but

  that's what keeps you going."

  Hendrickson began looking for large fossils after meeting Swiss pale-

  ontologist Kirby Siber at a gem and mineral show in 1984. He invited her

  to help dig for prehistoric whales in Peru. There, in 1985, she met Larson.

  The two soon became involved both professionally a n d romantical-

  ly. On one of their first expeditions, they almost froze to death search-

  ing for meteorites in the Peruvian m o u n t a i n s . "We didn't have the right

  gear to stay up at that elevation overnight," Hendrickson says, "but we

  looked at each other a n d realized that this was too good an o p p o r t u n i -

  ty to pass up."

  In 1987, Hendrickson began helping Larson h u n t for dinosaurs and

  other ancient fossils at the Mason Quarry. She was, says Larson, a quick

  study. "Susan loves to learn," he says. "She gets attached to a subject a n d

  reads everything and asks questions. I'm the kind of person w h o will tell

  you ten times m o r e than you want to k n o w about something. Well, she