1990
Skeleton of Tyrannosaurus Rex Discovered
On this day in 1990, fossil hunter Susan Hendrickson discovers
three huge bones jutting out of a cliff near Faith, South Dakota. They turn out
to be part of the largest-ever Tyrannosaurus rex skeleton ever
discovered, a 65 million-year-old specimen dubbed Sue, after its discoverer.
Amazingly, Sue’s skeleton was over 90 percent complete, and the
bones were extremely well-preserved. Hendrickson’s employer, the Black Hills
Institute of Geological Research, paid $5,000 to the land owner, Maurice
Williams, for the right to excavate the dinosaur skeleton, which was cleaned
and transported to the company headquarters in Hill City. The institute’s
president, Peter Larson, announced plans to build a non-profit museum to
display Sue along with other fossils of the Cretaceous period.
In 1992, a long legal battle began over Sue. The U.S. Attorney’s
Office claimed Sue’s bones had been seized from federal land and were therefore
government property. It was eventually found that Williams, a part-Native
American and member of the Cheyenne River Sioux tribe, had traded his land to
the tribe two decades earlier to avoid paying property taxes, and thus his sale
of excavation rights to Black Hills had been invalid. In October 1997,
Chicago’s Field Museum purchased Sue at public auction at Sotheby’s in New York
City for $8.36 million, financed in part by the McDonald’s and Disney
corporations.
Sue’s skeleton went on display at the Field Museum in May 2000.
The tremendous T.rex skeleton–13 feet high at the hips and 42 feet long
from head to toe–is displayed in one of the museum’s main halls. Another
exhibit gives viewers a close-up view of Sue’s five foot-long, 2,000-pound
skull with its 58 teeth, some as long as a human forearm.
Sue’s extraordinarily well-preserved bones have allowed
scientists to determine many things about the life of T.rex. They have
determined that the carnivorous dinosaur had an incredible sense of smell, as
the olfactory bulbs were each bigger than the cerebrum, the thinking part of
the brain. In addition, Sue was the first T.rex skeleton to be
discovered with a wishbone, a crucial discovery that provided support for
scientists’ theory that birds are a type of living dinosaur. One thing that
remains unknown is Sue’s actual gender; to determine this, scientists would
have to compare many more T.rex skeletons than the 22 that have been
found so far.