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

by Steve Fiffer

  I prepared myself mentally for prison. I closed myself in. I could no

  longer engage my family."

  On February 22, Larson and his wife m a d e the ten-hour drive from

  Hill City to Florence, which lies 110 miles southwest of Denver. They

  I K E P T W A I T I N G F O R S O M E T H I N G T O H A P P E N 1 9 3

  parked outside the gate of the wall-less m i n i m u m security prison, where

  about 80 percent of the 400 inmates were serving time for drug-related

  crimes. Larson and Kristin talked, held hands, cried, and kissed. Then

  Larson climbed out of the car and headed inside.

  Task n u m b e r one was to fill out a prison induction form. "Under

  'reason for incarceration,' the guard put 'failure to fill out forms,'"

  Larson laughs. "That was what my crime was called. That's what I got 24

  m o n t h s for after all the accusations a n d all the horrible things they

  accused us of."

  After filling out the form, Larson was given a number, a uniform, a

  b u n k in a 32-man dormitory, and a work assignment—shoveling snow

  (despite the fact that he was still recovering from his broken leg a n d was

  walking on a cane). He couldn't shovel, b u t he had to stand outside

  while the shoveling was done.

  T h r o u g h past travails, Larson had learned "my key to survival is to

  work my ass off." Once situated in the prison, he started writing a b o o k

  and several papers about the science of the T. rex. He also started plot-

  ting a way to get Sue back.

  Any sale, or, for that matter, any other plan for Sue had to be

  approved by the T. rex's trustee, the federal government. The Depart-

  ment of the Interior had entrusted that job to the Aberdeen office of the

  Bureau of Indian Affairs. In a newspaper report published before Larson

  went to prison, the BIA's Carson M u n d y said that he had seen six u n s o -

  licited offers for the dinosaur. Five proposals came from companies that

  wanted to help Williams finish cleaning and preparing the bones a n d

  then assist him with the sale. Sotheby's, the p r o m i n e n t auction house,

  had also offered to sell Sue on consignment. M u n d y said that n o n e of

  the proposals were from m u s e u m s but that all came from within the

  United States.

  Was a sale within the United States required? No, said Mundy. As

  trustee, the government's role was to determine the "highest and best

  use" for Williams's benefit, not the benefit of the United States. If a high-

  er offer came from outside the country—from either a m u s e u m or a

  private collector—the government could not stand in the way of a sale.

  Kevin Schieffer, firmly ensconced in the private sector now, took

  note of the developments. "My angst and anguish of a professional

  1 9 4 TYRANNOSAURUS S U E

  nature had occurred years before," he says. "At this point, I was beyond

  that. I just thought, What will be will be."

  Peter Larson, firmly ensconced in prison, was unwilling to give up

  the fight. "I had some spies on the outside telling me what was going

  on," he says. "I still thought there might be a way to get her back."

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  E V E R Y T H I N G C H A N G E D

  T H A T D A Y

  "Five million two hundred thousand," Redden repeated.

  Dede Brooks signaled to the auctioneer. He smiled. Her

  mystery bidder was finally in the game.

  "Five million three hundred thousand," Redden said.

  On a w a r m June day in 1997, three m e n entered a warehouse in East

  Harlem to examine merchandise said to have a street value of at least $ 1

  million. John McCarter, Jr., John Flynn, a n d Bill Simpson had c o m e all

  the way from Chicago to determine whether the stories were true: that

  the goods—laid out on shelves and in boxes—were first rate, o n e of a

  kind, must have. They needed to check the quality of the stuff in person

  before finding someone to help t h e m acquire it. They held it in their

  hands. They took photos. They took measurements. And then they left.

  If they did go after the merchandise, McCarter would be in charge

  of the operation, including finding the silent partners to assist in the

  purchase. Flynn and Simpson were his experts, the ones w h o could pre-

  pare the goods so that they might become infinitely m o r e valuable. "Is

  this something you want?" McCarter asked the two m e n as they stood

  in the parking lot outside the warehouse.

  Each said yes.

  And so the Field M u s e u m began its effort to acquire Sue.

  The Harlem warehouse belonged to Sotheby's New York. Maurice

  Williams had put the T. rex up for auction. Liberated after almost five

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  1 9 6 TYRANNOSAURUS S U E

  years in the machine shop at the South Dakota School of Mines, Sue was

  scheduled to go on the block in about four m o n t h s , on October 4. In the

  m e a n t i m e , interested parties could inspect her by a p p o i n t m e n t only.

  Williams's decision to sell Sue had not come easily. Although del-

  uged with purchase offers, he had hoped to retain ownership of the fos-

  sil. "We planned on having it here," he said in a telephone interview after

  the auction. "I had a relationship with the people at the School of

  Mines. I'm disappointed." He explained that he had wanted to charge

  people m o n e y to watch the cleaning and preparation of the specimen,

  sell casts of the skeleton, a n d take Sue on tour. In detailing these plans,

  Williams m a d e no effort to hide the fact that this was, as he had told

  Primetime Lives Sylvia Chase, all about money. (He even tried, unsuc-

  cessfully, to charge m o n e y for the interview excerpted in this book.

  "What do you expect us p o o r people to do?" he asked.)

  Williams says that a lack of m o n e y forced h i m to a b a n d o n these

  plans. "The fossil was in storage at the School of Mines. The government

  refused to pay storage costs, a n d I couldn't afford to," he said. "I asked,

  'Is it g o n n a be d u m p e d in the street?'"

  Enter David Redden, Sotheby's executive vice president. Redden

  had been following the custody battle for Sue for some time. "I was fas-

  cinated by it," he admits. "It was a wonderful snapshot of m a n y aspects

  of o u r social compact, wasn't it? The rights of paleontologists, Native

  Americans, the rights of the public—each of which can be debated."

  W h e n it appeared that the Native American would emerge victorious,

  Redden contacted him.

  The suave Englishman had never sold a dinosaur, but he firmly

  believed that Sue was, in his words, "an absolute candidate for the auc-

  tion process." He explains: "I was intrigued by the challenge facing

  Maurice Williams and the federal government. It [Sue] was not some-

  thing he was going to keep, I didn't think. It required administration.

  But how to move it to the next owner was a real challenge."

  In 1995 and 1996, Redden talked with Williams on the p h o n e and

  visited h i m in South Dakota to make the pitch that the auction process

  could best meet that challenge. He found Williams to be both intelligent

  and savvy. W h e n asked if he needed information about Sotheby's, the
<
br />   rancher said, no, he was familiar with the auction house.

  E V E R Y T H I N G C H A N G E D T H A T D A Y 1 9 7

  What did Redden tell Williams? "That the process could do three

  things: one, assign a value; two, sort out the various possible contenders;

  and three be a mechanism for bringing to the forefront candidates w h o

  might not be so obvious." These candidates, Redden acknowledged,

  might include private collectors rather than m u s e u m s . Williams didn't

  care. If he was going to sell the dinosaur he says, he was going to sell it

  to the highest bidder, be that an institution or an individual.

  Redden eventually sold Williams on selling Sue. In consigning the

  dinosaur to the auction house, the rancher turned down numerous offers

  from a variety of parties, including private collectors, museums, and cor-

  porations. O n e Las Vegas casino was reportedly interested in making Sue

  a featured attraction. In November 1996, Sue was released from her hold-

  ing cell in Rapid City and sent east to her halfway house in Harlem.

  If Sue seemed a natural to be sold by Sotheby's, she also seemed

  a natural to be acquired by the Field Museum. The institution first opened

  its doors in 1893. Known then as the Columbian Museum of Chicago, its

  stated purpose was the "accumulation and dissemination of knowledge,

  and the preservation and exhibition of objects illustrating art, archaeolo-

  gy, science and history." In 1905, the museum's n a m e was changed to Field

  Museum of Natural History to h o n o r its first major benefactor, Marshall

  Field (of the department store family), and to better reflect its focus on the

  natural sciences. Thanks largely to expeditions by its own scientists, the

  museum's natural history collections are considered among the best in

  the world, ranking the institution in the same category as the Smithsonian,

  the American Museum of Natural History, and the British Museum.

  The Field has m o r e than 20 million zoological, botanical, a n t h r o -

  pological, and geological specimens. These include dinosaurs found by

  paleontologist Elmer Riggs during the golden age of dinosaur h u n t i n g .

  Just five years after opening its doors, the m u s e u m had hired Riggs, a

  confederate of B a r n u m Brown, to find a brontosaurus. M u s e u m s in

  New York and Pittsburgh were already drawing large crowds with their

  75-foot-long skeletons of this ancient herbivore.

  Riggs unearthed a big dinosaur in 1900, b u t it wasn't a b r o n -

  tosaurus, and it wasn't 75 feet long. It was a 90-foot-long brachiosaurus

  ("arm lizard"). Until recently, this plant eater was thought to be the

  largest land animal ever.

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  TYRANNOSAURUS S U E

  Unfortunately, Riggs's brachiosaurus was less than 25 percent com-

  plete. Insufficient for display, the dinosaur rested in storage for more

  than 90 years—until the museum's one h u n d r e d t h birthday. Then, to

  celebrate the occasion, the Field unveiled a glorious skeleton created by

  supplementing the Riggs bones with sculpted material from a more

  complete specimen in the H u m b o l d t M u s e u m in Berlin.

  Brachiosaurus was not the only Riggs find standing on the museum

  floor. In 1901, the paleontologist did unearth a brontosaurus (now reclas-

  sified as apatosaurus). This specimen was complete enough to display and

  has long been the main attraction of the Field's "Life Over Time" exhibit.

  W h y with two stunning dinosaurs already roaming its landscape

  would the m u s e u m be interested in Sue? Bakker provides the short

  answer: "They didn't have a T. rex!' Not a real one, anyway In the late

  1920s, the p r o m i n e n t paleontological artist Charles Knight created a

  series of colorful, detailed murals for "Life Over Time." The most

  famous of these murals depicts a battle between a T. rex and a

  Triceratops. H o r n e r notes that Knight's depiction has flaws but was a

  valiant effort for its day. "Today, we'd make the legs m o r e birdlike and

  the snout longer, and we might make the body lean forward more, and

  raise the tail farther," he writes in The Complete T. Rex. "But at least

  Knight got T. rex off its haunches."

  Word that a three-dimensional T. rex would be auctioned off had

  gotten John McCarter, the Field's president and chief executive officer

  since October 1996, off his haunches. He is a friendly, balding m a n in

  his early sixties. A graduate of Princeton and the Harvard Business

  School, he earned his living as a m a n a g e m e n t consultant in Chicago

  before coming to the m u s e u m . He was no stranger to the not-for-prof-

  it sector, however. From 1989 to 1996, he had served as chairman of the

  board of W T T W , Chicago's public television station.

  Like Peter Larson, McCarter envisioned Sue as a centerpiece that

  would draw visitors to his museum's d o o r for generations to come. "You

  need a big, defining exhibit," he says. " D o you k n o w what the most vis-

  ited object is in a m u s e u m ? T h e H o p e D i a m o n d at the Smithsonian. It

  brings 'em in."

  Bringing 'em in, says McCarter, has many advantages, not the least

  of which is generating revenue to support less glamorous endeavors.

  "The reason we do dinosaurs is so that we can do fish," he says. He

  E V E R Y T H I N G C H A N G E D T H A T D A Y 1 9 9

  explains that the fish in the museum's collection may shed m o r e light on

  evolution than Sue or any other dinosaur will shed, but having a

  dinosaur draw like Sue would "allow us to have financial robustness and

  strength to fulfill the museum's mission."

  Because Sue's bones had been in storage for over five years, McCarter

  wanted Flynn, the Field's head of geology and an accomplished dinosaur

  hunter in his own right, and Simpson, the museum's chief preparator, to

  inspect the fossil firsthand. "We wanted to see how it would stand up to

  preparation," says Simpson. If the bones were too soft and crumbly, too

  "punky," as the preparator puts it, the m u s e u m would not be able to

  clean them, study them, and reconstruct t h e m for display.

  Seeing Sue was bittersweet, Flynn recalls. "It was depressing to see

  such a specimen in an auction warehouse." At the same time, "there was

  excitement, especially seeing the skull. It was spectacular. In paleontol-

  ogy my joy comes from fossil discovery or seeing a beautiful specimen.

  . . . This was the H o p e D i a m o n d of fossils." In the parking lot outside the

  warehouse, Simpson told McCarter that he was "thrilled to see that the

  b o n e was hard. It was well preserved. [Preparation] could be done."

  Flynn agreed. "We do not take any specimen into o u r collection

  unless it has scientific value and meets [some or all of] o u r goals of

  research, exhibition, and education Here, with the quality of preser-

  vation, the completeness of skeleton, you could ask questions you

  couldn't of any other T. rex. ... It met all three goals."

  McCarter had already discussed Sue with Judy Block, the chairper-

  son of the museum's board of trustees. After returning to Chicago from

  New York, he told her, "This is serious." He quickly met
with Block and

  the trustees' executive committee, w h o gave h i m the green light to, as

  McCarter says, "figure out a way to get it."

  The first thing McCarter had to figure out was h o w m u c h m o n e y he

  might need and w h o could provide the money. "Getting it didn't m e a n

  just having it in plaster jackets in the building," says Flynn. "We would

  clean it, m o u n t it, develop an exhibition, and [conduct] world-class sci-

  entific research." All these activities would require funds above and

  beyond the purchase price.

  The Field was already in the process of preparing an ambitious

  exhibition for 1999, " U n d e r g r o u n d Adventure." Here, visitors would

  take a simulated journey underneath the Illinois prairie. "Shrunk" to the

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  size of an insect, the travelers would meet animatronic ants and spiders

  along the way. The cost of the exhibit would be $10 million. The fund-

  ing source? Corporations, including Monsanto, which alone had donat-

  ed $4 million.

  McCarter knew he would also need corporate support to acquire Sue

  and prepare her for exhibition. O n e company immediately came to mind.

  McCarter sat on the board of directors of W. W. Grainger Corporation.

  So, too, did Fred Turner, then the chairman of McDonald's. At a Grainger

  board meeting, McCarter pulled Turner aside, told h i m about Sue, and

  asked whether the fast food giant might consider helping the museum

  acquire the giant carnivore.

  W h y McDonald's? The c o m p a n y was based in the Chicago area and

  already had a long-standing relationship with the m u s e u m . Equally

  i m p o r t a n t , McDonald's had a rich history of c o m m u n i t y involvement,

  particularly in supporting programs with an impact on young people.

  McCarter remembers that Turner responded enthusiastically to his

  initial overture. "I didn't even have to give h i m my full spiel," says the

  m u s e u m director.

  Back at McDonald's headquarters in Oakbrook, a suburb west of

  Chicago, Turner turned the matter over to a vice president, Jack Daly.

  Daly, a genial m a n in his early fifties, is not in charge of marketing but

  rather worldwide c o m m u n i c a t i o n s . "I'm involved in managing the rep-

  utation of the b r a n d and the reputation of the corporation," he explains.