In 1990, a fossilized dinosaur dubbed Sue the T-Rex was discovered by the Black Hills Institute.
It was a triumph for science — until betrayal, lawsuits, and the FBI turned
the whole thing into a tragic morality play. Here's the real-life story of Sue the T-Rex.
On the morning of August 12, 1990, Sue Hendrickson left the other members of her fossil-hunting team
to walk alone on the South Dakota ranch where they'd been looking for specimens.
The ranch's owner, Maurice Williams, had given them permission to look on his land.
Hendrickson spotted some dark shapes in the rock and knew she had found something big.
Literally. She took a fragment back to her team from South Dakota's Black
Hills Institute, led by Peter Larson. Larson later told PBS,
"I'd never seen the inside of a T-Rex vertebrae before,
but I knew that was what I was looking at the minute I saw these things."
He was right. Sue had stumbled on the most intact T-Rex skeleton ever discovered, including 250
bones. It would eventually stand at 42 feet long — but first, the team had to dig it out of the rock,
a process that took 17 days. Once that was done, they shipped the fossils back to the Institute,
paid Williams $5,000, and nicknamed the T-Rex Sue after its discoverer.
It wasn't easy being a dinosaur. A post-mortem conducted on Sue found
that the T-Rex survived numerous injuries before dying of as-of-yet unknown causes.
According to New Scientist, the post-mortem found healed fractures on ribs on Sue's
right and left sides, indicating that it must have survived two traumatic attacks.
Bones in the arms and legs showed signs of healing from infections, and it had some sizable holes
in its jaw, which the researchers believe were caused by parasites rather than other dinosaurs.
Sue also apparently suffered from back problems and possibly even arthritis. Despite its various
injuries and illnesses, though, Sue is thought to have been the ripe old age of
28 when it died — not bad considering that life expectancy for a T-Rex has been estimated at 35.
Located in Hill City, South Dakota, the Black Hills Institute is a fossil collection, fossil
shop, and fossil-preparing workshop founded by brothers Peter and Neal Larson in 1974.
Although the Larsons and their team take a scientific approach
to hunting and excavating fossils, they are a for-profit business,
which makes them controversial in the world of dinosaur digging.
Some academics argue that amateur fossil hunters,
and their sometimes legally questionable fossil-finding practices, contribute to
our collective scientific knowledge. In 1993, an anonymous paleontologist told the New York Times,
"the collection methods of many museums and universities would not bear too close a scrutiny
[...] some of our best specimens have been found by amateurs and commercial dealers. As long as
fossil dealers work in scientifically responsible ways, they have a right to make a living."
However, some paleontologists worry that when fossils come
with price tags — and when prices are consistently increasing — specimens
will end up in private collections where they can't be studied by researchers or
viewed by the public. As paleontologist Paul Sereno told the Chicago Tribune,
"With prospectors carrying off bones for commercial sale before scientists can study
them in the ground, we are losing information on an escalating pace."
Getting Sue out of the cliff and back to the Institute was just the start of the hard work.
Peter Larson put the institute's best preparator, Terry Wentz,
to work preparing the fossil. In the documentary Dinosaur 13, Wentz recalled,
"That was a big job. It took me literally a year
just to remove individual bones from around the skull."
One of the hardest parts was disconnecting the skull from where it was resting on the pelvis.
In the documentary, Wentz described the moment they were finally safely separated as,
quote, "probably the highest point of my life."
As Wentz worked, Larson invited scientists and members of the public to watch his progress,
and invited a team of 30 paleontologists to put together a comprehensive monograph on T-Rex.
Larson maintained that he had no intention of selling Sue:
he wanted her to become the centerpiece of a museum at the Institute.
It wasn't only scientists — Hill City residents and schoolchildren were fascinated by Sue.
The T-Rex and the Institute received a lot of press coverage.
This attracted the attention of Vincent Santucci, a paleontologist and geologist
for the National Park Service. In Dinosaur 13, Santucci explained that he was outraged
watching fossil collectors waltz off with valuable artifacts without, in his view,
the proper permissions. He suspected that Larson hadn't gotten the permissions he
needed to claim Sue — because Maurice Williams technically hadn't had the right to sell it.
As a member of the Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe, Williams owned the land Sue was found on. But
because it was tribal land, it was technically held in trust by the Department of the Interior,
which means that even though he supposedly owned the land, he actually was required
to get permission from the federal government to sell Sue — and he hadn't.
Santucci alerted the Park Service, who alerted the tribe, who felt that Sue belonged to them.
And their reservation desperately needed the revenue a T-Rex fossil could generate. The
tribe pleaded their case to Acting U.S. Attorney Kevin Schieffer — who authorized an FBI raid.
On the morning of May 12, 1992, the Black Hills Institute team woke to find FBI agents
and National Guard raiding their facility. The agents demanded they turn over Sue,
as well as any documents related to it, and any other fossils found on Williams' land.
“One of our workers came over and said, the whole place is crawling with FBI!
And I said…" laughs incredulously
Larson protested, as the 67 million year old dinosaur skeleton was very fragile and
could easily be damaged. The FBI, however, had guns. They brought in a team from the
South Dakota Museum of Geology at the School of Mines to move the bones to their facility;
then they brought in the army..
Hundreds of protestors then showed up, demanding that Sue be left where she was,
but the government refused to budge. Larson told PBS,
"When the trucks drove away [...] everybody
was just crying [...] It was like Sue had died for the second time."
The Institute filed a lawsuit against the Department of Justice, the Department of Interior,
the Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe, and the School of Mines and Technology, claiming that Sue was their
property. Shortly after, Williams jumped into the fray, claiming that the $5,000 he'd received at
the dig site wasn't towards purchasing Sue anyway, and therefore he actually still owned the fossil.
The lawsuit over who owned Sue was a civil matter. But things soon got more serious
for the Institute. While supporters continued their "Free Sue" campaign,
the media coverage convinced the Justice Department to make a high profile example
of the Institute in order to try and discourage other commercial fossil
hunters who had been taking advantage of lackluster protection of federal property.
In November 1993, five months after the FBI raid, the Department of Justice brought 39 counts and
153 charges against six members of the Black Hills Institute. The charges included wire fraud,
theft of government property, and making false statements to government agencies.
Peter Larson was charged with conspiracy,
obstruction of justice, illegal collection of fossils, theft of government property,
and customs violations — though the charges were technically all related to fossils other than Sue.
There was one clear winner in the case of who owned Sue. In 1994, United States District Judge
Richard Battey ruled that Williams hadn't had the right to sell Sue to the Institute
in 1990 because he hadn't requested permission from the federal government,
so the $5,000 purchase was void. This meant that the ownership of Sue went back to Williams.
This was bad news for the Institute and for the Cheyenne River Sioux.
Gregg Bourland, Superintendent of the Cheyenne River Agency, later told PBS,
"We have a long-standing history of getting screwed by some unscrupulous type folks around
the country, including other governments, so we're pretty much used to this kind of stuff."
Things quickly got worse for the Institute. Several members were convicted of various
misdemeanors and felonies, but while most of the sentencing was light,
Larson had the book thrown at him. Though he was only convicted of two misdemeanors,
in 1996 he was sentenced to two years in prison, a $5,000 fine, and two years supervised release.
An example had been made.
After the decision to return the ownership of Sue to land owner Williams, he officially
requested permission from the federal government to sell Sue, which was granted.
In 1996, Sue was moved to Sotheby's auction house in New York, where it was finally reunited with
one member of the Institute. Terry Wentz spent 2,000 hours helping to prepare Sue for sale,
but it was bittersweet. He told the Los Angeles Times,
"I've had a long relationship with her. I may never be able to work with her again."
The auction took place on October 5, 1997. Wentz was joined by Sue Hendrickson, and like many in
the scientific community, they were concerned that Sue the T-Rex would be purchased by a
private collector, costing the general public the opportunity to learn more about dinosaurs.
Luckily for the people of the world, a couple of unlikely benefactors
stepped in to help make sure that didn't happen: McDonald's and the Walt Disney Company. Yes,
Mickey and Mickey D's banded together with private donors to help The Field Museum in
Chicago raise the money to buy Sue. The final price tag: $8,362,500, $7.6 million
of which ultimately went to Williams after the auction house took its cut. As a reward
for their efforts, both McDonald's and the Walt Disney Company were given replicas of the T-Rex,
so… now you also know the Untold Truth of where Chicken McNuggets come from!
Larson's appeal to the Eighth Circuit Court against his unusually harsh penalty
was denied. He started serving his two-year sentence in February 1996,
ultimately getting out in December 1998. He tried to make the best of it. He told Roger Ebert.com,
"During bad times, there are some wonderful things that happen as well.
Even before I went to the slammer, that's what I wanted to concentrate on."
His strange case made him something of a prison celebrity. He taught classes on paleontology and
life on Mars. But it still wasn't much fun; shortly after being released from prison
Larson and his wife divorced. He told The Telegraph that he felt,
quote, "very unhinged for [...] six months."
Once he was back on his feet, though, he wrote a book and went right back to fossil
hunting with the Black Hills Institute. The team has since discovered nine more
T-Rexes and has even managed to get involved in another drawn-out civil
suit over the so-called Dueling Dinosaurs — a pair of dinosaurs who died in mid-battle.
And in 2020, following yet another lawsuit, Peter Larson's brother Neal sold off the museum's T-Rex
skeleton called Stan over Peter's objections, a sale which brought in more than $31 million.
Like other members of the Institute, Sue Hendrickson was pursued by the FBI,
which was looking for evidence that they had illegally taken fossils from government property.
She became too scared to use landline phones, thinking they might be bugged, stopped contacting
her former colleagues and friends, and dropped out of the limelight. But she continued exploring.
In addition to dinosaurs, Sue specializes in marine archaeology. According to the Los
Angeles Times, she was part of the team that discovered the San Diego, a Spanish galleon
which sank in 1600, and she's also explored Cleopatra's palace and Napoleon's warships,
both submerged in the harbor of Alexandria, Egypt.
Sue the T-Rex is a much more public figure. It took 12 museum preparators 30,000 hours to get
the fossil ready for display in the Field Museum's huge main hall, which it joined
in 2000. But one crucial bit was missing: the incredibly well-preserved skull was too heavy
to put on the body. Instead, a cast was used, with the original skull on display above the main hall.
As well as captivating visitors, Sue the T-Rex has helped scientists
learn more about T-Rex and dinosaurs generally. In 2018, Sue was moved again,
this time into its own private suite nearer the museum's other dinosaurs.
Peter Larson still visits Sue whenever he's in Chicago, telling the Billings Gazette,
"I have visitation rights."
Check out one of our newest videos right here! Plus, even more Grunge videos about weird history
are coming soon. Subscribe to our YouTube channel and hit the bell so you don't miss a single one.