by Steve Fiffer
that's just what I did." After two h o u r s she found herself back where she
had started.
"I started to cry," she confesses. Her failure to find the cliff was not
the only cause for tears. D u r i n g their time at the quarry, she and Larson
had mutually agreed to break up.
Determined to find out what had been calling her, Hendrickson
waited until the fog lifted a n d began the trek a second time. Two hours
later she stood at the foot of the 60-foot-high, buff-colored formation.
"It's not easy to find fossils," Larson says. "You're trying to figure out
what's b o n e a n d what's not. You're seeing fragments a n d trying to imag-
ine what they are, selecting which fragments are important. You have to
have a good eye that can spot textural differences and color differences.
Susan does."
Bakker adds: "There are some people w h o can find fossils and some
w h o can't. Sue has the talent for getting a sense of place in a paleonto-
logical context. You must be b o r n with it. She was. And she has honed
it."
Hendrickson began her search by walking along the b o t t o m of the
cliff, eyes on the g r o u n d . "Usually you walk along the b o t t o m to see if
anything has dribbled down," she explains. "If you don't see anything,
you walk along the middle of the formation, if it's not too steep. And
then you might walk a third time across the top, just to hit the different
levels."
Halfway through her first pass at the b o t t o m , she saw a "bunch of
dribbled-down bones." Where had they come from? Hendrickson
IT M U S T BE A T. REX 17
looked up. "Just above eye level, about 8 feet high, there it was: three
large dinosaur vertebrae and a femur weathering out of the cliff. It was
so exciting because they were very large a n d because of the shape. T h e
carnivores like T. rex had concave vertebrae from the disk; it dips in. T h e
herbivores—the Triceratops or duck-bills is what you almost always
find—have very straight vertebrae. So I knew it was a carnivore. I knew
it was really big. And therefore I felt it must be T. rex, but it can't be T.
rex because you don't find T. rex." At the time only 11 other T. rex had
ever been found.
T. rex actually lived closer in time to the first h u m a n s (about 60 mil-
lion years apart) than it did to the first dinosaurs (about 160 million
years apart). It first appeared toward the end of the Cretaceous period,
probably about 67 million years ago. Its evolutionary history remains
somewhat cloudy, but several respected scientists believe that it may
have been closely related to a Mongolian meat eater, Tarbosaurus bataar
(also called Tyrannosaurus bataar). It is possible that descendants of this
dinosaur emigrated from what is n o w Asia to what is n o w N o r t h
America; the continents were connected at that time.
The famous fossil collector B a r n u m Brown found the first three T.
rex in the Wyoming and M o n t a n a badlands in the early 1900s while on
expeditions for the New York-based American M u s e u m of Natural
History. Like the Larsons, Brown became interested in fossils at an early
age, collecting specimens uncovered by the plow on his family's farm in
Carbon Hill, Kansas. And like Hendrickson, he seemed to possess a sixth
sense for finding bones, or at least a unique fifth one. "Brown is the most
amazing collector I have ever k n o w n . He must be able to smell fossils,"
said Henry Fairfield Osborn.
It wasn't Brown's sense of smell but his vision that resulted in his
first M o n t a n a find in 1902. M o n t h s earlier, William Hornaday, the
director of the New York Zoological Society, had shown Brown a paper-
weight m a d e from a fossil he had found while h u n t i n g in eastern
Montana. Brown identified the fossil as d i n o s a u r — p a r t of a Triceratops
horn. After looking at photographs of the area where H o r n a d a y had
been hunting, Brown sensed that the land, part of the Hell Creek
Formation, might be ripe with dinosaurs.
He was right. In July 1902, Brown found dinosaur bones in a sand-
stone bluff on the same ranch where Hornaday had found his fossil. The
1 8 TYRANNOSAURUS S U E
skeleton, which contained about 10 percent of the creature's bones, was
not fully excavated and shipped to New York until 1905. By that time
O s b o r n had identified it as a new species of dinosaur, which he chris-
tened Tyrannosaurus rex ("tyrant lizard king").
In 1907, Brown discovered a second T. rex skeleton in eastern
M o n t a n a . This specimen was even better than the first—with 45 percent
of the bones, including an excellent skull—"a ten strike," in Brown's
words. In between these finds, O s b o r n determined that bones Brown
had found in 1900 in the Lance Creek Beds of Wyoming were also those
of a T. rex.
T h e T. rex was the biggest carnivore discovered to date. It had mas-
sive legs, a short, thick neck, and a narrow chest. Its tail was relatively
short, and its hips were relatively narrow. Its a r m s were surprisingly
small, about the length of h u m a n arms—just 3 feet long. It had two fin-
gers. Its huge skull was heavily reinforced, distinguishing it from other
big carnivores. It had sharp, deadly teeth the size and shape of bananas.
W h e n those teeth fell out, new ones replaced them. The dinosaur itself
may never have stopped growing.
As the biggest, baddest dinosaur, T. rex quickly captured the fancy of
early twentieth-century America. The press dubbed it "The Prize Fighter
of Antiquity" a n d hyperbolized that "the swift two-footed tyrant
m u n c h e d giant amphibians and elephant au naturel." In 1915, record
crowds flocked to the American Museum when it m o u n t e d the first p u b -
lic exhibition of a T. rex, unveiling a fully restored, freestanding skeleton
of Brown's second M o n t a n a find. As Philip Currie, curator of dinosaurs
at Canada's Royal Tyrrell Museum of Paleontology, wrote in the preface
to Sotheby's catalog for Sue, Tyrannosaurus rex became the "standard
against which other dinosaurs are measured . . . the most famous
dinosaur."
Most paleontologists consider a T. rex, which has approximately 300
bones, scientifically significant if it is at least 10 percent complete. Some,
like Larson, determine this percentage based on the n u m b e r of bones
found. Others peg their figure to the percentage of the dinosaur's total
surface area f o u n d , n o m a t t e r h o w m a n y b o n e s are recovered.
Proponents of each m e t h o d agree that 59 years passed between Brown's
last find and the discovery of the fourth T. rex in 1966 by Harley
Garbani, a professional p l u m b e r and longtime amateur paleontologist
IT M U S T BE A T. REX 19
collecting in eastern M o n t a n a for the Los Angeles C o u n t y M u s e u m of
Natural History. Over the next 24 years, seven m o r e T rex would be
found in Montana, South Dakota, and Alberta. T h e best of these speci-
mens, the eleventh T. rex, was found in 1988 in the eastern M o n t a n a
badlands by
Kathy Wankel, a local rancher. H o r n e r a n d a crew from the
Museum of the Rockies excavated the skeleton in June 1990, just two
m o n t h s before Hendrickson m a d e her discovery. Forty feet long and,
according to Horner, almost 90 percent complete, this find d e t h r o n e d —
for the m o m e n t , anyway—Brown's American M u s e u m T. rex as the
finest ever.
W h e n Hendrickson found what she thought might be the twelfth T.
rex, she tried to contain her excitement. "I didn't j u m p up and d o w n a n d
scream," she says. "But I was thinking, Wow! What was so cool was that
the vertebrae were mostly going into the hill, so it looked like the poten-
tial for more. Usually you find the last little bit of b o n e and there's n o t h -
ing m o r e [because it has eroded]. I knew this was part of o n e specimen,
and that if the visible bones were all there was, it would have been
important. But I knew there was more."
Hendrickson didn't disturb the bones in the cliff. She did, however,
pick up a few pieces from the ground, each about Wi to 2 inches across.
"They were all hollow," she says. "I've picked up thousands of other
pieces of bones before, and they were all solid." Theropods, the class of
carnivorous dinosaurs that included T. rex, were hollow-boned, like
birds. The excitement building, Hendrickson flew back to camp, where
she knew Larson would have resumed excavating after the trip to town.
She found Larson on his knees digging up the Triceratops skull on
Sharkey Williams's land. "Pete, I have to show you something," she said
breathlessly.
"I had never seen T. rex vertebrae, b u t I knew that's exactly what I
was looking at," says Larson. He is an u n a s s u m i n g m a n , trim with sandy
hair and a thick mustache. Dressed in khaki slacks and a plaid shirt, he
wears wire-rimmed glasses. He looks like an athletic academic as he sits
in his small, book-filled office in the institute's basement r e m e m b e r i n g
the discovery. Just d o w n the hall, a technician is using a device called an
airbrade to clean some dinosaur bones. The airbrade sprays powder
with compressed air to blow off dust a n d rock from the bone. The base-
m e n t sounds like a dentist's office.
2 0 TYRANNOSAURUS S U E
How did Larson know Hendrickson had brought him T. rex vertebrae?
"The size of the fragments, the curvature of the bone. The open spaces."
He picks up a cervical vertebra from a T. rex found after Sue. "It's been
waterworn before it was fossilized, and you can see where the surface of
the bone has been weathered away," he explains. "You can see these open
spaces inside, kind of a honeycomb texture. That's exactly the same texture
you find in bird bones and theropods—where birds come from. This is all
connected to the respiratory system through the openings right here.
There are air sacs, just like birds. I just knew what the fragments were."
Identifying fossils was not always so easy. In his delightful book Dinosaur
Hunters, David A. E. Spalding, the former head curator of natural histo-
ry at the Provincial M u s e u m of Alberta, tells the story of one Robert Plot.
Plot was a seventeenth-century British naturalist and the first curator of
the Ashmolean M u s e u m in Oxford. Like m a n y scientists of the day, he
was still influenced by the mysticism of the Middle Ages. He speculated
that fossils might have been created by petrifying juices to adorn the
inside of the earth, just as flowers had been m a d e to adorn the surface.
In his 1677 opus The History of Oxfordshire, Plot provided an illus-
tration of what appears to be a dinosaur bone. If so, it is the first p u b -
lished record of such a fossil. Of course, Plot didn't identify it as such;
the word "dinosaur"—from the Greek deinos, meaning "terrible," a n d
sauros, meaning "lizard"—was coined 165 years later in 1842 by the
British paleontologist and anatomist Sir Richard Owen. Instead, Plot
said that the bone, dug from a quarry and given to h i m by a fellow
Englishman, was similar to the lowermost part of the thigh of a m a n "or
some greater animal than either an Ox or Horse and if so it must have
been the Bone of s o m e Elephant, brought hither during the Govern-
m e n t of the Romans in Britain."
After seeing a living elephant for the first time, Plot changed his
m i n d . The b o n e must have belonged to s o m e giant m a n or w o m a n , he
said. While the actual fossil has been lost, Spalding argues that the illus-
tration is clearly that of a dinosaur b o n e , probably of the carnivorous
Megalosaurus.
Fast forward almost 90 years to 1763 and the publication of Richard
Brookes's The Natural History of Waters, Earths, Stones, Fossils, and
Minerals. Brookes copied Plot's drawing and described it as Scrotum
IT M U S T BE A T. REX 21
humanum. Writes Spalding: "It is not k n o w n whether this was a serious
attempt at identification or a bizarre joke."
Brookes's description was taken seriously by J. B. Robinet, a French
philosopher. In 1768, Robinet called the fossil a "stony scrotum." Such
objects represented nature's attempts to form h u m a n organs in a quest
to create the perfect h u m a n type, he hypothesized.
Eager to test his hypothesis that Hendrickson had found a T. rex, Larson
hustled his colleague into the institute's truck. They sped to Maurice
Williams's fence line, then ran the additional 2 miles to the cliff. "Here,"
Hendrickson said, pointing to the bones, "this is my going-away gift to
you."
The normally m i l d - m a n n e r e d Larson admits that he got excited.
"Sue took me over to the spot, and there were literally thousands of lit-
tle fragments of b o n e lying on the g r o u n d and some bigger pieces and
you could see there were parts of vertebrae and we looked up about 7
feet up on the face of this cliff and there was this cross section of bones
about 8 feet long coming out and I crawled up there and we could see
three articulated vertebrae. And I knew at that instant that it was all
there. Call it intuition or whatever. I just knew. I knew this was gonna be
the best thing we'd ever found and probably ever would find."
After locating the cliff on a topographic m a p , Larson called his
assistant, Marion Zenker, at the institute and asked her to verify that
Maurice Williams owned the section of land on which the cliff was
located. Williams had given permission to look on his property, b u t
determining w h o owns what within the boundaries of a reservation is
often problematic. Some land is owned outright by individuals. Some
land is owned by the tribe. Some land is leased from the tribe by indi-
viduals. And some land owned by individuals is held in trust by the fed-
eral government. In some instances, o n e ranch "owned" by a Native
American may include parcels of land that fall into all these categories.
Larson wanted to make sure he was dealing with the true owner of
the site where the bones sat. Zenker called the land registrar for Ziebach
County, where the ranch was located. T h e registrar told her tha
t
Maurice Williams owned the land and had a couple of oil leases on file.
Larson called Williams that night. "I told h i m we had found some-
thing that looked really good," Larson says. Williams gave h i m permis-
2 2
TYRANNOSAURUS S U E
sion to excavate, but still forbade h i m to drive o n t o the property. "I told
Maurice, 'It's big. We're going to have to drive on at least once to take it
off,' a n d he said, 'Okay,'" Larson remembers.
That night dinosaurs visited Larson as he slept. Such visits weren't
u n c o m m o n , especially w h e n the paleontologist was on a dig. "I always
dream about what I'm going to find," he says.
Larson wanted his brother Neal, w h o had gone h o m e for the week-
end, to see the site before the digging began.
"I was thinking I'd be coming back and we'd be closing up the quar-
ry for the summer," Neal says. "Then I got a p h o n e call from Peter on
Saturday night."
" W h e n you come back, I want you to bring lumber and plaster of
Paris, and, oh, bring the trailer, too," Peter Larson said as nonchalantly
as possible.
"What did you find, Pete, a skeleton?"
"You'll see."
Neal was hooked now. "What kind of skeleton? Is it a Triceratops?"
"You'll see when you get here."
"Is it a duck-bill?"
"You'll see." Older brothers didn't t o r m e n t younger brothers in the
days dinosaurs roamed the e a r t h — b u t only because there weren't any
h u m a n s a r o u n d then.
Neal Larson was eager to learn what kind of skeleton had been
found, but he wasn't eager e n o u g h to leave for the quarry the next day.
"It was Sunday, and I hadn't been to church for a few weeks," he
explains.
Neal, a little r o u n d e r and a little less studious looking than Peter,
arrived in Faith on Monday, August 14, with the trailer and all the other
supplies on Peter's shopping list. By that time, Peter had christened the
dinosaur Sue, after Hendrickson, w h o still has mixed emotions about
the appellation. "I'm deeply honored," she says. "It's just that I've never
liked my n a m e — S u e , Susan, whatever. I just don't care for it." She adds,
"Of course, at the point Pete n a m e d it after me, it was just three articu-
lated vertebrae. We didn't k n o w h o w great she'd be."