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-