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

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Tyrannosaurus Sue-- The Extraordinary Saga of the Largest, Most Fought Over T. Rex Ever Found Page 4

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."

 

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