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 19

by Steve Fiffer


  available for study and display. Although Schieffer had his own prefer-

  ence and would later lobby for it, he did not believe the decision was his

  to make. "The question needs to be resolved by the administration," he

  said after Judge Battey ruled.

  The usually loquacious Williams initially declined c o m m e n t . A few

  days later, when reached by reporter Pamela Stillman of Indian Country

  Today, he said that he owned Sue. "The laws are very clear."

  The chairman of Williams's tribe disagreed. "Both the landowner

  [Williams] and the institute committed a crime on the reservation by

  digging up the fossil," Gregg Bourland told Stillman."[Battey's opinion]

  goes to show that justice has been served." Steve Emery, the tribal attor-

  ney, added that the tribe would soon file an action in tribal court for

  ownership of Sue; the tribal council had approved such a filing six weeks

  earlier but, at Schieffer's request, had waited to act until Judge Battey's

  decision.

  Before the week was over, Duffy had filed a brief requesting that

  Judge Battey reconsider the ruling. "This court's decision is on a colli-

  sion course with Indian self-determination," wrote Duffy.

  Emery also invoked Indian self-determination in his a r g u m e n t on

  behalf of the tribe. "We had gold in the Black Hills, a n d we lost the Black

  Hills. Now we've got paleontological gold and they came in and ripped

  that up."

  O n e could imagine Primetime Lives Sylvia Chase returning to the

  Black Hills after Judge Battey's opinion a n d asking the same question of

  Larson, Schieffer, Bourland, and Williams that she had asked m o n t h s

  earlier. " W h o owns Sue?" The television correspondent would have

  found that nothing had changed. All four still claimed ownership. T h e

  parties seemed m u c h less concerned with the noble virtue of self-deter-

  mination than they were with self-aggrandizement.

  As the i n h a r m o n i o u s quartet continued to fiddle around, the bones

  of contention continued to sit, if not crumble, at the School of Mines.

  Said the institute's Zenker: "This is probably the premiere paleontolog-

  1 2 0 TYRANNOSAURUS S U E

  ical specimen of the world today, and to have it hidden away in the dark

  in a giant metal container is not at all what we had in m i n d or suppos-

  edly what the government had in m i n d , but that's what's happening."

  And, remarkably, that's what would continue to happen for almost

  five m o r e years.

  7

  J U R A S S I C F A R C E

  "Four million dollars."

  Fred Nuss, a tan, wiry man in his forties leaned forward in

  his chair. The fossil hunter hadn't come from his home in Otis,

  Kansas, to bid on the dinosaur. He already had a T. rex,

  although it wasn't quite as complete as Sue.

  Unlike Peter Larson, Nuss had decided to sell his dinosaur.

  He and his business partner Alan Detrich were asking $10 mil-

  lion for the specimen, which they called, "Z. rex" after a ranch-

  er named Zimmerscheid. Their dream was the academic commu-

  nity's nightmare. The entrepreneurs didn't care if the buyer was

  a museum or a private collector or if Z. ended up in the United

  States or abroad. Nuss had once sold a mosasaur skull to actor

  Charlie Sheen for $30,000.

  John Tayman, a writer who covered the auction for Outside

  magazine, reported: "When each million-dollar threshold was

  reached, Nuss and his team let out a polite whoop and then sat

  back giggling while the hundreds of thousands flew by."

  While the institute lawyers constructed their appeal of Judge Battey's

  decision, Peter Larson reconstructed the life of his other T. rex. Each of

  Stan's scars told a story. "We surmise that [he] scuffled for territory,

  fought over food, and engaged in other behavior similar to today's car-

  nivores," Larson wrote.

  1 2 1

  1 2 2 TYRANNOSAURUS S U E

  Stan's "pathologies" included several broken and healed ribs and a

  scar the same size as a T. rex tooth. He also appeared to have suffered

  a n d survived a broken neck. In the process of healing, two vertebrae

  fused together a n d a third became immobilized by extra b o n e growth.

  His cheeks also showed evidence of healed injuries.

  Looking at Stan's skull, Larson the paleontologist turned phrenolo-

  gist. "Most chilling is a healed injury on the back of the braincase," he

  wrote. " T h r o u g h the back end of the skull we found a circular hole m o r e

  than 1 inch in diameter—into which a T. rex tooth fits nicely. The hole

  ends at a spot where a large c h u n k of b o n e (2 inches by 5 inches) actu-

  ally broke away. Amazingly, Stan lived t h r o u g h this incredible injury

  because a thin layer of b o n e sealed the broken surface."

  Stan Sacrison, the amateur w h o had found this T. rex, had also

  helped collect Z. rex. After spending m o n t h s on their own looking for

  such a dinosaur without luck in 1992, Nuss and Detrich had driven to

  Buffalo, South Dakota, to see if Sacrison and his twin brother Steven

  might help t h e m . Stan, an electrician by day, and Steven, a construction

  worker a n d part-time grave digger, had enjoyed great success digging

  for fossils. T h e twins, in their mid-thirties at the time, introduced Nuss

  a n d Detrich to Zimmerscheid, w h o had found bones on his land out-

  side of town.

  Like Sue Hendrickson, the brothers seemed to have been b o r n with

  the ability to find fossils. T h e lanky, sandy-haired Stan was just 8 years

  old when he found his first dinosaur bone, the vertebra of a Triceratops.

  He has been h u n t i n g for dinosaurs ever since.

  In 1987, Sacrison first spotted the bones of the T. rex that would

  eventually be n a m e d after h i m . His description of first seeing vertebrae

  weathering out of a cliff calls to m i n d Hendrickson's discovery of Sue.

  In need of an expert opinion, Sacrison called the M u s e u m of

  Geology in Rapid City for help. T h e museum's "expert" told h i m he'd

  found a Triceratops a n d opined that it wasn't worth excavating. Sacrison

  took the advice. As a result, nothing was d o n e for five years.

  In 1992 Sacrison h a p p e n e d to tell a friend about the find. The friend

  suggested that he call Peter Larson. Larson looked at the bones and,

  again, immediately k n e w that they belonged to a I rex, n o t a

  Triceratops. Thus began a mutually beneficial relationship between the

  Sacrisons a n d Larson. Stan Sacrison credits Larson with helping him

  J U R A S S I C F A R C E 1 2 3

  hone his collecting skills a n d enabling h i m to indulge his passion for

  collecting by paying him for his finds.

  The contemporary Larson/Sacrison relationship echoes the nine-

  teenth-century relationship between Edwin Drinker Cope and his p r o -

  tege Charles H. Sternberg. Sternberg was b o r n in 1850 in upstate New

  York. Like Sacrison, he developed a love of fossils at an early age. In 1867

  his family moved to a farm on the Kansas prairie. There, he began col-

  lecting in earnest.

  When he was 10, Sternberg fell 20 feet from a ladder, p
ermanently

  injuring his left leg. He walked with a p r o n o u n c e d limp for the rest of

  his life. This injury did not prevent h i m from pursuing his dream and

  eventually earning a living excavating and selling dinosaurs a n d fossils

  to m u s e u m s a n d individuals a r o u n d the world. In his 1909 autobiogra-

  phy, The Life of a Fossil Hunter, he recalled: "I m a d e up my m i n d . . . I

  would make it my business to collect facts from the crust of the earth;

  that thus m e n might learn m o r e of 'the introduction and succession of

  life on our earth.' My father was unable to see the practical s i d e . . . . He

  told me that if I had been a rich man's son, it would doubtless be an

  enjoyable way of passing my time, b u t as I should have to earn a living,

  I ought to turn to some other business."

  The Life of a Fossil Hunter painstakingly details the trials and tribu-

  lations of the m e n w h o earned a living hunting bones in the second half

  of the nineteenth century. In 1876, while a student at the Kansas State

  Agricultural College, Sternberg attempted to join an expedition led by

  Benjamin F. Mudge, a geology professor w h o collected specimens for

  Othniel C. Marsh. Mudge t u r n e d h i m d o w n . Sternberg later wrote:

  "Almost with despair, I turned for help to Professor E. D. Cope of

  Philadelphia. . . . I put my soul into the l e t t e r . . . . I told him of my love

  for science and of my earnest longing to enter the chalk of western

  Kansas a n d make a collection of its wonderful fossils, no matter what it

  might cost me in discomfort and danger."

  Confessing that he was too p o o r to go at his own expense, Sternberg

  boldly asked Cope to send him $300 "to buy a team of ponies, a wagon,

  and a c a m p outfit, and to hire a cook a n d driver." Cope responded

  quickly. Sternberg writes: " W h e n I opened the envelope, a draft for $300

  fell at my feet. The note that accompanied it said: 'I like the style of your

  letter. Enclose draft. Go to work,' or words to the same effect."

  1 2 4 TYRANNOSAURUS S U E

  Sternberg went to work. In the Kansas chalk, he toiled from dawn to

  dusk, "forgetting the heat and the miserable thirst and the alkali water,

  forgetting everything but the one great object of my life—to secure

  from the crumbling strata of this old ocean bed the fossil remains of the

  fauna of Cretaceous Times."

  The constant labor, however, weakened him. "I fell a victim to

  malaria, a n d w h e n a violent attack of shaking ague came on, I felt as if

  fate were indeed against me." In the middle of a shaking fit, he found a

  fine mosasaur, which Cope would later n a m e Clidastes tortor because of

  its flexible backbone. "Forgetting my sickness, I shouted to the sur-

  r o u n d i n g wilderness, ' T h a n k God! T h a n k God!'" Sternberg wrote.

  W h e n Cope traveled west a few m o n t h s later, in August 1876,

  Sternberg a n d his assistant J. C. Isaac met h i m in O m a h a . "I remember

  h i m watching me with astonishment as I limped along the street on my

  crippled leg. At last t u r n i n g to Isaac, . . . he asked, 'Can Mr. Sternberg

  ride a horse?'"

  Isaac answered that he had seen Sternberg " m o u n t a pony bareback

  and cut o n e of his mares from a herd of wild horses." That satisfied

  Cope. Sternberg remembered: "When we got to Montana, he gave me

  the worst-tempered pony in the bunch."

  A bad pony was the least of Sternberg's worries once the party

  reached the Badlands just a few weeks after General Custer and his m e n

  fell at Little Bighorn. Indians did not present a problem, but the terrain

  did. Sternberg recalled a frightening slip while crossing a sandstone ledge

  where a perpendicular escarpment dropped downward for 1000 feet.

  "God grant that I may never again feel such horror as I felt then, when the

  pick, u p o n which I had depended for safety, rebounded as if it had been

  polished steel, as useless in my hands as a piece of straw. I struck franti-

  cally again, but all the time I was sliding d o w n with ever-increasing rapid-

  ity toward the edge of the abyss . . . and certain and awful death below."

  Sternberg survived—"To this day I do not k n o w how," he wrote—to

  face m o r e m u n d a n e troubles: "We were tormented by myriads of black

  gnats, which got under o u r hat rims a n d shirt sleeves, and produced

  sores that gave rise to pus and thick scabs We were forced, for lack of

  something better, to cover o u r faces and arms with bacon grease."

  The results of the expedition made the torment tolerable. In the

  Cretaceous formations of Montana, Cope and Sternberg found dinosaurs.

  J U R A S S I C F A R C E 1 2 5

  Judge Battey might have found Sternberg's century-old observations about

  the discovery interesting. "Fossil bones always partake of the characteris-

  tics of the rock in which they are entombed, and here they were quite hard

  when we got into where the rock was compact," he wrote in his auto-

  biography

  In the rock, Cope found, for the first time in America, a specimen

  of a horned dinosaur. He n a m e d it Monoclonius. Sternberg himself

  found two new species, including Monoclonius sphenocerus, another

  horned dinosaur which Cope estimated to have been 25 feet long and 6

  or 7 feet high at the hips.

  Sternberg spent m a n y years collecting for Cope. The two remained

  friends until the professor's death in 1897. That friendship, however, did

  not prevent Sternberg from collecting for Marsh after Cope's financial

  ruin. He also collected for and sold his fossils to n u m e r o u s m u s e u m s

  a r o u n d the world.

  In the s u m m e r of 1901, Sternberg journeyed to the red beds of

  Texas, near Willow Springs, for the Royal M u s e u m of Munich. By that

  time, fossil collecting had become a family affair. Sternberg's sons,

  George, Levi, and Charlie, all worked with their father in the field. The

  weather was so hot, "I saw cattle die of thirst and starvation," Sternberg

  wrote. " H o w can I describe the hot winds, carrying on their wings

  clouds of dust, which were so c o m m o n that year and the next?"

  Again, success mitigated the hardship. Sternberg found a relatively

  complete skeleton of Labidosaurus, an ancient and primitive reptile. The

  specimen became a prize of the Munich collection.

  Over the next few years, the Sternbergs continued to work in Texas

  and the Badlands. In 1908, they went to southern Wyoming to look for

  Triceratops. On the same day they found a Triceratops skull, they found

  other dinosaur bones weathering out of a sandstone escarpment. After

  spending several days excavating the sandstone, they took their chisels

  to a block containing the breastbone.

  Sternberg, w h o had gone to town to ship the Triceratops skull to the

  British Museum, recounts what he saw u p o n his return:

  Shall I ever experience such joy as when I stood in the q u a r r y

  for the first time, and beheld lying in state the most complete

  skeleton of an extinct animal I have ever seen, after 40 years of

  1 2 6 TYRANNOSAURUS S U E

  experience as a collector! T h e crowning sp
ecimen of my life's

  work!

  A great duck-billed dinosaur . . . lay on its back with front

  limbs stretched out as if imploring aid, while the hind limbs in

  a convulsive effort were drawn up and folded against the walls

  of the a b d o m e n . The head lay u n d e r the right shoulder.

  Sternberg speculated that the dinosaur may have fallen on its back

  into a morass a n d died of a broken neck or drowned. "If this was so, the

  antiseptic character of the peat-bog had preserved the flesh, until,

  t h r o u g h decay, the contents of the viscera had been replaced with sand.

  It lay there with expanded ribs as in life, w r a p p e d in the impressions of

  the skin whose beautiful patterns of octagonal plates marked the fine

  sandstone above the bones."

  W h y was the Sternbergs' duck-bill, which to this day is known as

  "the m u m m y dinosaur," so well preserved? After dying in the water, "the

  gases forming in the body floated the carcass," Sternberg surmised.

  " W h e n the gases escaped, the skin collapsed and occupied their space."

  Sternberg sold this find of his life to the American M u s e u m of

  Natural History, a n d whenever he was in New York, he m a d e a special

  point of seeing it. He continued collecting into his eighties and died at

  age 93 in 1943. His sons also continued to collect and were responsible

  for n u m e r o u s i m p o r t a n t dinosaur finds, primarily in Canada.

  Looking back on his years as a fossil hunter, Sternberg wrote:

  What is it that urges a m a n to risk his life in these precipitous fos-

  sil beds? I can only answer for myself, but with me there were two

  motives, the desire to add to h u m a n knowledge, which has been

  the greatest motive of my life, and the hunting instinct, which is

  deeply planted in my heart. Not the desire to destroy life, but to

  see it. The m a n whose love for wild animals is most deeply devel-

  oped is not he w h o ruthlessly takes their lives b u t . . . he w h o stud-

  ies them with loving sympathy and pictures them in their various

  haunts. It is thus that I love creatures of other ages and that I want

  to become acquainted with t h e m in their natural environments.

  They are never dead to me; my imagination breathes life into the

  "valley of dry bones," and not only do the living forms of the ani-

 

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