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

by Steve Fiffer

  find it hard to even recognize their childish efforts." Larson chose to

  ignore the resolution.

  Convinced that he had legally purchased the "theropod skeleton

  Sue" from Williams, Larson had also chosen to ignore a letter that the

  rancher had sent h i m on November 10, 1990, about three m o n t h s after

  the discovery: "I didn't sell the fossil to you. I only allowed you to

  remove it and clean it and prepare it for sale." T h e institute had heard

  nothing from Williams or the tribe about Sue over the last 18 m o n t h s .

  Now, the Journal reported, Gregg Bourland, the chairman of the

  tribe, said that the Sioux had agreed to a partnership with Williams to

  determine the future of the dinosaur. That future might include making

  a cast of the T. rex for a m u s e u m on the reservation, the sale of a limit-

  ed n u m b e r of replicas of the skeleton, and donation of the bones to a

  college, said Bourland.

  Larson, at the Stan site, was unavailable for c o m m e n t , but the insti-

  tute's attorney, Patrick Duffy, told the Journal that Williams's sale of Sue

  to the institute was legal. "I'm convinced that the tribe has no claim to

  the fossil at all," he said.

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  TYRANNOSAURUS S U E

  Over the next two weeks, Larson was m o r e interested in getting Stan

  out of the g r o u n d and Sue's skull into a crate than he was in the tribe's

  claim, which he considered meritless. Wentz had extricated the skull

  from the pelvis by tunneling between the hips and the lower jaw bone.

  O n c e the other bones a r o u n d the skull were removed, Larson and Wentz

  planned to get the skull into a wooden shipping crate that they had

  designed.

  The crate was 6 feet long by 3 feet wide by 3 feet high; each of its six

  sides could be removed individually, allowing for better viewing or p h o -

  tography of the skull from various angles. T h e pair would cover each of

  these six sides with a removable layer of protective foam. The skull still

  sat on its original, though cut d o w n , pallet. Larson and Wentz planned

  first to build four sides and the top of the crate around the skull—fas-

  tened to this pallet. They would then wrap the skull itself in industrial-

  strength plastic, t u r n the whole thing over, remove the pallet, and make

  a new b o t t o m for the crate. NASA had told t h e m that the skull should

  be as clean as possible; any plaster or foil would compromise the CAT

  scan.

  As the skull's May 17 departure date neared, m o r e details of the

  tribe's claim surfaced, as did pretenders to Sue's crown. The local Timber

  Lake Topic reported that only three days after the Larsons had first

  a n n o u n c e d the discovery of Sue in September of 1990, the tribe had

  passed resolution E-335-90CR d e m a n d i n g return of the skeleton and

  requesting assistance from the Bureau of Indian Affairs. The tribe still

  asserted ownership, but Williams seemed to be distancing himself from

  the council. He told the Topic that there was no binding contract or sale.

  "Williams said he didn't k n o w what the $5000 check was for but that

  'maybe it might have been for mitigation,'" the paper reported.

  It was unclear what Williams meant by "mitigation," but it was clear

  that he stood to benefit if the sale was invalid a n d the dinosaur was his.

  G o r d o n Walker, a private collector from British Columbia, told the

  Topic that he had offered Williams $1 million for the T. rex if he could

  get her back. He urged Larson to "come to his senses" and do right by

  Williams.

  W h o could declare the sale invalid and determine ownership?

  Schieffer said he was contemplating filing a complaint in federal court

  against the institute and that if he did, he would handle the case per-

  N E V E R , E V E R F O R S A L E 4 5

  sonally. Wait, said Mark Van N o r m a n , an attorney for the tribe: A civil

  action in tribal court might be the best way of resolving the matter.

  On May 12, five days after the Topic article appeared and five days

  before the scheduled departure to Huntsville, Larson received a call from

  his longtime friend Dr. Clayton Ray, a curator of vertebrate paleontology

  at the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C. Ray

  reported that someone identifying himself as an FBI agent had called the

  m u s e u m and asked h o w best to pack and move T. rex bones. Larson sus-

  pected that the caller had been Walker, trying to stir up trouble. Larson

  had recently angered the Canadian collector when he refused to verify

  that a "dinosaur egg" with an "embryo" in it that Walker was attempting

  to sell was genuine. "It wasn't a dinosaur egg. And the 'embryo' was a

  quartz formation," Larson says.

  Larson told Duffy about the call. Duffy immediately p h o n e d

  Schieffer. "We had the only T. rex around," Duffy later explained. "So I

  asked him if the government was planning to seize Sue. He told me no."

  Schieffer says he didn't say no or yes. "I didn't divulge anything. I

  can't imagine any prosecutor confirming or denying anything where

  you are under investigation. It would be extraordinarily stupid to talk

  about it."

  Who's telling the truth? Perhaps each m a n is. U p o n receiving such

  a p h o n e call, few U.S. attorneys would confirm that a seizure was i m m i -

  nent; to do so would give the subject of an investigation time to alter,

  destroy, or hide evidence. Says one former assistant U.S. attorney: "You

  generally say you can't c o m m e n t on it. At the same time it's not u n u s u -

  al to, without lying, try and give the impression that nothing is being

  planned."

  On May 13, Larson and Wentz continued readying Sue's skull. They

  were visited by National Park Service Ranger Stanley Robins, with

  w h o m Larson had served on the South Dakota State Historical Society

  Task Force on Paleontology. Robins frequently came by the institute to

  check on the preparation of the fossil. On this day he observed the

  progress they were making with the skull, bought some Sue m e m o r a -

  bilia at the gift shop, and bade good-bye. At the time, Larson and Wentz

  didn't give the visit a second thought.

  Larson went to bed that evening in a good m o o d . In 96 h o u r s Sue

  would be on her way to Huntsville, where the technology of the 1990s

  4 6 TYRANNOSAURUS S U E

  would unlock mysteries 67 million years old. While there, Larson would

  talk to NASA about something else: "I wanted to volunteer to go to Mars

  a n d collect fossils," he says.

  He slept well that night. As usual he had dinosaur dreams. It was the

  last good night's sleep he would get for a long time.

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  Y O U B E T T E R GET

  O U T H E R E , P E T E

  "One million dollars."

  Seated toward the back of the room, Stanford "Stan"

  Adelstein, a wealthy businessman from Rapid City, South

  Dakota, started to raise his auction paddle. He had journeyed

  east on behalf of the Black Hills Institute with $1.2 million in

  his war chest, while Peter Larson waited back in Hill City with

  butterflies in his sto
mach. "I thought just because of all the

  hype and the fact that she was a media star that she might

  bring as much as half a million or a million dollars," Larson

  would later say. "People were making these wild predictions,

  but they didn't have a clue of what the market was like.

  Because if you looked at the market, there was no way to

  predict this price. What had happened, of course, was the

  notoriety. The persona of Sue had created the story. I mean

  she was the most famous fossil in the world."

  When Karl Haberlein put his Archaeopteryx up for sale in 1862, Sir

  Richard Owen was superintendent of the British Museum. Owen sent a

  representative to Bavaria with an offer: 500 p o u n d s . Haberlein said no;

  the 700-pound price, like the specimen, was set in stone. Owen met with

  his trustees and persuaded t h e m to give him an additional 200 p o u n d s ,

  and soon the British M u s e u m had added another feather to its cap.

  4 7

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  TYRANNOSAURUS S U E

  No d o u b t Owen, a superb anatomist, would have examined the

  specimen from head to toe—if part of the head hadn't been missing. As

  it was, he did conduct a t h o r o u g h analysis of the fossil. Acknowledging

  that the Archaeopteryx did possess some reptilian features, Owen point-

  ed to the feathers as "unequivocally" proving that the creature was a

  bird. There was no evidence that this was one of Darwin's missing links,

  he reported to the Royal Society in November of 1862.

  Only a handful of Archaeopteryx have been discovered since Owen's

  report. O n e of the most significant of these was found in a m u s e u m ,

  rather than in the field. In 1970, John Ostrom, a paleontologist at Yale

  University, "unearthed" the specimen at the Teyler M u s e u m in Haarlem,

  the Netherlands. Apparently on finding it in 1855, von Meyer had

  misidentified it as a pterodactyl.

  O s t r o m found a lot of similarities between Archaeopteryx and

  dinosaurs that led h i m to conclude that the Archaeopteryx had evolved

  directly from theropods. Not everyone in the scientific community

  agreed. Birds are warm-blooded, while dinosaurs were cold-blooded,

  they argued. Ostrom admitted that he was uncertain whether dinosaurs

  were endothermic like birds and h u m a n s . But that didn't matter, he said.

  The anatomical similarities between Archaeopteryx and smaller carni-

  vores, particularly coelurosaurian dinosaurs, demonstrated the link.

  Bakker, w h o studied u n d e r O s t r o m at Yale, was not the least bit

  uncertain: dinosaurs, at least the carnivores, were warm-blooded, he

  argued in 1975. A m o n g his arguments: the ratio of dinosaur predators

  to prey is almost identical to the m o d e r n ratio of warm-blooded preda-

  tors to prey—about one predator for every 10 prey. Cold-blooded

  predators like crocodiles, he noted, require far less food and live in den-

  sities where the ratio is the same in relation to prey.

  Bakker is perhaps the best k n o w n paleontologist in the world. His

  long, bushy beard certainly makes h i m the most recognizable. His way

  with w o r d s — h e has written novels as well as treatises—makes h i m the

  most quotable. And his fearlessness in forwarding new theories (along

  with his willingness to criticize his fellow PhDs) often makes h i m the

  most controversial. In addition to forwarding new theories on w a r m -

  bloodedness, he was the first to put feathers on dinosaurs, doing so as

  early as 1967 in his undergraduate thesis at Yale. He was also the first to

  Y O U B E T T E R G E T O U T H E R E , P E T E 4 9

  propose a wholly new classification system that separates dinosaurs

  from other reptiles and puts t h e m in a new class with birds.

  Many scientists disputed Bakker's ideas about warm-bloodedness,

  trying to poke holes in the rationale for his predator-to-prey conclu-

  sions. Undaunted, he pointed to the dinosaur's skull as further evidence.

  Holes located near the brain's blood supply may have worked as radia-

  tors to cool the hot blood, he argued.

  Because theropods and birds shared m a n y characteristics, Larson,

  too, suspected that the T. rex was w a r m - b l o o d e d . "Sue may be m o r e

  closely related to the h u m m i n g b i r d than to, say, the triceratops," he said.

  He was hopeful that NASA's CAT scan of Sue's skull would provide

  m o r e light than heat in the w a r m - b l o o d e d vs. cold-blooded debate.

  The trip to Huntsville should also answer questions about the brain

  size, if not the intelligence, of Sue and her fellow T. rex. H o r n e r report-

  ed that the CAT scan of the skull of the Wankel/Museum of the Rockies'

  find revealed that the T. rex brain, while smaller than that of an elephant

  or rhinoceros, "was larger than that of almost all reptiles and other

  dinosaurs; proportionately, it was nearly as big as that of s o m e birds."

  He added that "to be a bird brain is no compliment by o u r standards,

  but for most m e m b e r s of the animal kingdom, the comparison is flat-

  tering."

  Dr. Dale Russell, curator of the N o r t h Carolina State M u s e u m of

  Natural History, was one of m a n y paleontologists interested in seeing

  what the CAT scan of Sue's skull would reveal about brain size. In 1981,

  Russell had speculated about the "evolution of intelligence" in dinosaurs

  if they had not become extinct. This speculation was informed by

  his study of Troodon formosus, a small bipedal carnivore from the

  Cretaceous period that he found in Alberta in 1968.

  Working with Ron Sequin, a taxidermist, Russell created a fiberglass

  model of the "dinosauroid"—the twentieth-century version of what the

  dinosaur might have become if its evolution had not been interrupted.

  The model stood for years in the National M u s e u m of Natural Sciences

  (now the Canadian M u s e u m of Nature) in Ottawa, Canada, next to a

  reconstruction of the Troodon. It looks decidedly m o r e like a h u m a n

  than a dinosaur. It stands upright on two legs and has a large, r o u n d

  skull, a short neck, a n d no tail.

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  TYRANNOSAURUS S U E

  Most of Russell's assumptions about the dinosauroid stemmed

  from the fact that Troodon had a brain weight to body weight ratio that

  compared favorably to that of early m a m m a l s . The paleontologist

  guessed, therefore, that the creature would have had a brain weight to

  body weight ratio similar to h u m a n s if it had survived the last 65 mil-

  lion years. If this assumption is correct, the skull would have had to be

  larger to a c c o m m o d a t e the larger brain. This leads to the shorter neck

  theory; carrying this larger skull on a long, horizontal neck like that of

  Troodon would have been problematic. The upright body leads in turn

  to the absence of the tail, which would no longer have been necessary to

  counterbalance the body.

  Like the dinosaur, the m o d e l features scaly skin, three-fingered

  hands, a n d no external sex organs. Unlike the dinosaur, it has a belly

  button; Russell speculated that the dinosauroid would have evolved

  from laying eggs to beari
ng its babies live. No nipples are discernible;

  just as birds feed their babies regurgitated food, so would the

  dinosauroid, Russell guessed.

  Of course, Russell's speculation about the dinosaur of today would

  not be necessary if the world h a d not kissed all dinosaurs (and about 70

  percent of all other species) good-bye s o m e 65 million years ago. What

  caused this mass extinction? Scientists and lay people alike have for-

  warded a wide range of theories. In a classic 1964 article in the American

  Scientist titled "Riddles of the Terrible Lizard," Glenn L. Jepson, a

  Princeton scholar, catalogued the " W h a t killed the dinosaurs?" theories,

  from the sublime to the ridiculous:

  Authors with varying competence have suggested that dino-

  saurs disappeared because the climate deteriorated (became

  suddenly or slowly too hot or cold or dry or wet), or that diet

  did (with too m u c h food or not enough of such substances as

  fern oils; from poisons in water or plants or ingested minerals;

  by bankruptcy of calcium or other necessary elements). Other

  writers p u t the blame on disease, parasites, wars, anatomical or

  metabolic disorders (slipped vertebral discs, malfunction or

  imbalance of h o r m o n e and endocrine systems, dwindling brain

  a n d consequent stupidity, heat sterilization, effects of being

  Y O U B E T T E R G E T O U T H E R E , P E T E 5 1

  warm-blooded in the Mesozoic world), racial old age, evolu-

  tionary drift into senescent over specialization, changes in the

  pressure or the composition of the atmosphere, poison gases,

  volcanic dust, excessive oxygen from plants, meteorites, comets,

  gene pool drainage by little m a m m a l i a n egg eaters, overkill

  capacity by predators, fluctuation of gravitational constants,

  development of psychotic suicidal factors, entropy, cosmic radi-

  ation, shift of Earth's rotational poles, floods, continental drift,

  extraction of the m o o n from the Pacific Basin, drainage of

  swamp and lake environments, sunspots, God's will, m o u n t a i n

  building, raids by little green hunters in flying saucers, lack of

  standing r o o m in Noah's ark, a n d paleoweltschmerz.

  In 1980, Luis Alvarez, a Nobel Prize-winning physicist, a n d his son

  Walter, a geologist, offered their o w n theory after unusually high levels

  of the element iridium were found in rock dating back to the time of the