The curse of the $8 million dinosaur
I saw Sue and the Minnesota Science Museum, guessing 15 to 20 years ago. It turned out to be quite the story.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/film/1101...osaur.html
To the untrained eye, the three bones jutting out from the cliff face would have looked like stones, bleached white in the blinding South Dakota sun. But as soon as Peter Larson saw them, on August 12 1990, he knew his life was about to change. An instinct honed over 40 years of fossil hunting told him that these bones, which he recognised as three articulated vertebrae of North America’s most celebrated dinosaur, the Tyrannosaurus rex, would lead him and his team at the Black Hills Institute (BHI) to even greater discoveries.
Despite everything that was to come later – the raid by the FBI, the acrimonious court case, the years in jail, all of which are the subject of a new film, Dinosaur 13 – when Larson talks about that first sighting, he still seems awestruck. “Before we even moved a scoop of dirt,” he says, leaning over the table in an empty London café, “I knew that she was going to be the most fantastic thing that we ever worked on. Of course, when we found the skull, which I knew was going to be there, it was so obvious how big she was and how really in many ways perfect she was. Every time we would uncover a bone it would just amaze me. There was nothing about that find that was disappointing. It was just always more and more and more excitement.”
For 17 days Larson and his four-strong team – his brother, Neal; Terry Wentz, the fossil preparator; and Susan Hendrickson, a volunteer at the BHI who’d first spotted the bones – worked to uncover the rest of the Tyrannosaurus rex. They used picks and shovels to dig down 30 ft into the cliff, as the mercury rose to 46 degrees Celsius.
By the time they had finished, the unbelievable truth had been confirmed: this, the 13th Tyrannosaurus rex ever found, was by far the largest and most complete. Only the smaller bones were missing; whereas other Tyrannosaurus rexes had been at most 40 per cent complete, this one was more than 90 per cent. They named her Sue, in honour of the woman who’d led to her discovery.
When the team had finished their work, they handed over a cheque for $5,000 to Maurice Williams, the Sioux Indian rancher who owned the land, which was in the heart of the Cheyenne River Indian Reservation. For the next two years – during which 2,000 people would visit the Black Hills Institute to look at Sue, among them about 30 scientists and palaeontologists – they prepared Sue for display. The plan was to install her at their museum, turning the small town of Hill City into a national – even global – destination for dinosaur-lovers.
Peter Larson (second from left) and Susan Hendrickson (third from left) at the dig site for Sue (ALLSTAR / LIONSGATE)
As they prepared her bones, they got to understand more about Sue’s life and death. “You could see things that happened to her,” says Larson. “Her left fibula was shattered and then partially healed, but continuously through her life she had this bacterial infection going on that would have caused her probably to limp. She had perforations in her jaws; you can imagine her fighting perhaps with another T rex for territory, or as a young animal. We saw snapshots of this living animal, not just this dead pile of bones.”
In May 1992 Terry Wentz painstakingly winched up the pelvis of the T rex, which had been covering the creature’s huge skull. It was a delicate operation and, for Wentz, it was “probably the highest point of my life”.
And, indeed, from there it was all downhill. On the morning of May 14, the FBI arrived with a warrant to seize Sue. Thirty agents descended upon the building, and, over the course of three days, they took Sue away, along with dozens of boxes full of other fossils (Larson estimates that they only ever received 20 per cent of these back). The charge was simple: stealing property from federal land. The handshake agreement with Maurice Williams was worthless, it turned out, because, although he owned the land, it was being held for him in trust by the Bureau of Indian Affairs.
READ: Living fossil found in China
Every day, local people turned out to protest about the seizure; eventually, about 20,000 people would sign a petition to “Save Sue”. The charged atmosphere even affected the people who were there to enact the warrant: “I remember the nice lady from the National Guard who was loading Sue’s skull; the tears were just pourin’ out of her eyes,” says Larson. “The emotions were raw with everybody, and they just overtook her, too.”
For the next few years, Sue would reside in Rapid City, at the South Dakota School of Mines and Technology – a place that happened to be Peter Larson’s alma mater. During the trial that followed the seizure, Larson would often stand outside the facility where Sue was being stored, and talk to her. “Mostly I was trying to reassure her that she wasn’t going to rot in that case, that I was going to get her out of there,” he says in the film.
When it came down to it, Larson failed. “We thought we had an excellent case,” he says. “We thought that, as personal property, [Williams] had the right to sell her. But the judge ruled that Sue was land, so he couldn’t sell her [without the permission of the Bureau of Indian Affairs]”. In February 1993, a judge ruled that Sue belonged to Williams. Four years later, Williams would sell her at auction to the Field Museum of Natural History, Chicago, for $8.36 million, making her the most valuable dinosaur in the world.
Meanwhile, Larson and the Black Hills Institute were being indicted on charges of wire fraud, money laundering, transportation of stolen property and a mess of other indictments arising from their activities in the fossil market. Larson was convicted of four minor violations, with a recommended sentence of six months. The judge, Richard Battey, gave him an “enhanced sentence” of two years. (Larson remains convinced that Battey held a grudge against him because he asked Battey to recuse himself from the case.)
Battles have been waged over dinosaurs since they were first discovered and classified in the early 19th century. Two of the great American palaeontologists of the mid-19th century, Edward Cope and Othniel Marsh, fought bitterly over the fossils they found, resorting to theft and bribery while they fired potshots at each other in the pages of learned journals. Along the way, they also discovered dozens of new dinosaurs, including the first specimens of stegosaurus and triceratops.
In Britain there was a more genteel tradition of amateur fossil-hunting, embodied most famously by Mary Anning (1799-1847). Anning scoured the base of the cliffs near her home in Lyme Regis, and helped to discover the first complete ichthyosaur when she was only 12 years old. She is supposedly the subject of the tongue-twister “She sells sea shells by the seashore” and, in her collection and selling of fossils, she is the spiritual forebear of Peter Larson and other commercial fossil-hunters.
In the States, however, and especially in recent years, a schism has emerged between academic palaeontologists and their commercial and amateur counterparts. “In the US it’s very divided compared to what it is in the UK,” says Dr Phillip Manning, a professor of natural history at the University of Manchester. “In the UK, one of the highest awards you can get from the Palaeontological Association is the Mary Anning award, and of course she was a professional collector: she sold fossils. In the US, in the last 10 years especially, there has been this change in attitude, that people who collect fossils are evil, if they sell them.”
One vocal representative of this line of thinking is Dr Thomas Carr, associate professor of biology at the Lutheran Carthage College in Kenosha, Wisconsin. Carr has argued for the use of “eminent domain” – akin to a compulsory purchase order – when it comes to significant fossil findings. “A fossil could be seized for public use (i.e. science, education),” he wrote in a blog posting in November 2013, “reposited in a museum where it can be accessed by scientists and the public, and the collectors compensated for the expense they took to collect the fossil.”
READ: Dinosaurs walked Earth '243 million years ago'
Many of the more conservative elements in the world of palaeontology share Carr’s views. Commercial and amateur fossil-hunters, they argue, don’t truly understand the value of what they collect; they are too driven by money, or the selfishly acquisitive urge of the collector.
There’s no doubt that there is a seamy side to fossil-hunting. In June, Eric Prokopi, a Floridian commercial palaeontologist, was jailed for three months for illegally importing and selling a Mongolian dinosaur, the Tyrannosaurus bataar; in 2006, four tons of fossilised dinosaur eggs and petrified pine cones and crabs were seized by US authorities from the annual Tucson Gem and Mineral Show. The fossils, worth around $400,000 (£240,000), were returned to Argentina, from where they had been pilfered.
But there are others, such as Larson, who treat their work as almost a sacred duty. “When you’re digging one of these animals,” he says, “it’s very much like if we were uncovering a mass grave of humans. This was a living entity that needs to be treated with great respect. It has things to tell us, so it’s kind of a crime scene investigation, and you have to do it soberly, with humility, because this is a very special thing that you’re able to do.”
Although Larson is only now studying for his PhD in palaeontology – under the supervision of Dr Phil Manning – he has always attempted to collect all the relevant scientific information during his digs. At the same time as he and his fellow Black Hills people were excavating Sue, Dr Jack Horner, professor at the University of Montana, scientific adviser on the Jurassic Park films, and just about the most famous palaeontologist in the US, was conducting his own Tyrannosaurus rex dig. His crew of 10 took five weeks to do what Larson’s group of four did in fewer than three.
Once a dinosaur is put up for sale, there is the danger that it might disappear forever into a private collection – large fossils have long been coveted by wealthy individuals and everyone from Microsoft multi-millionaire Nathan Myhrvold to the actor Nic Cage have spent considerable sums to install them in their homes.
In 1956, the fossilised remains of Archaeopteryx lithographica were discovered in a quarry in Germany owned by a man named Eduard Opitsch. The archaeopteryx was one of the first true birds, and, as Opitsch’s was only the third to be discovered, its scientific value was almost incalculable. For almost 20 years he allowed palaeontologists to study the fossil but, in 1974, he took it back from the museum in which it had been stored and studied. When Opitsch died, 17 years later, the fossil was nowhere to be found; whether sold or stolen, it had indubitably vanished.
The thought of fossils disappearing from sight is what frightens academics such as Thomas Carr, who describes them as “non-renewable resources”. Carr has written that auctions of dinosaur fossils are “flagrant and public humiliations of science”. That museums and universities might be priced out of bidding is, to Carr, a moral aberration.
Larson takes a different view: “Sue sold for $8.36 million. Look at how many paintings sell for more than $100 million. If you want to find the money, the money’s there.” (And, of course, it was a museum that bought Sue.)
During Larson’s time in prison, the Black Hills Institute barely managed to stay afloat. “We were able to stay alive because we had some wonderful museums which made purchases in support of us,” he says. “It was just awesome. I answered almost 1,997 letters for the 18 months I was in Florence, from people who supported me.”
When he returned to work he was demoralised, but not broken. “I was very unhinged for, I suppose it was really six months,” says Larson. “It was certainly a year before I was back to being able to accomplish tasks in a meaningful way.”
Five years ago, new legislation came into force to control the collection of fossils on public land. The Omnibus Public Land Management Act states that while amateurs or commercial fossil collectors can pick up invertebrate fossils (molluscs, worms, sponges, corals and so on) on public land, they are not permitted to do the same with vertebrate fossils.
This sort of legislation is anathema to Larson. He remembers finding his first fossil, aged four; it was a dinosaur tooth, and it sparked the interest that has kept him going for the past 40 years. “Amateurs are the ones who make all the discoveries,” he says. “It’s like astronomy; you need lots of eyes to find things. You see something that causes you to dig.”
What does he think would have happened to Sue if the Black Hills Institute hadn’t found her? “She would not have been found, no way. Because of the rate of erosion that was occurring on that cliff face, I estimate that today the pelvis would be gone, and the front half of the skull. All the teeth, gone. It would still have been important, but it would have been half a skeleton now.”
Since they found Sue, Larson and his fellow fossil-hunters have gone on to discover nine more T rexes, and, despite all the acrimony over their greatest ever find, Larson still loves what he does. “There are people who’ve entered the business for a short time thinking that they were going to get rich; well, they quickly find out that that’s not the case,” he says. “You have to be willing to survive on very little. And so it’s a labour of love. Those of us who do this – and in academia, too – most of the people who study fossils fell into love with dinosaurs when they were kids. We all have Peter Pan syndrome: we just never grew up.”
I saw Sue and the Minnesota Science Museum, guessing 15 to 20 years ago. It turned out to be quite the story.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/film/1101...osaur.html
To the untrained eye, the three bones jutting out from the cliff face would have looked like stones, bleached white in the blinding South Dakota sun. But as soon as Peter Larson saw them, on August 12 1990, he knew his life was about to change. An instinct honed over 40 years of fossil hunting told him that these bones, which he recognised as three articulated vertebrae of North America’s most celebrated dinosaur, the Tyrannosaurus rex, would lead him and his team at the Black Hills Institute (BHI) to even greater discoveries.
Despite everything that was to come later – the raid by the FBI, the acrimonious court case, the years in jail, all of which are the subject of a new film, Dinosaur 13 – when Larson talks about that first sighting, he still seems awestruck. “Before we even moved a scoop of dirt,” he says, leaning over the table in an empty London café, “I knew that she was going to be the most fantastic thing that we ever worked on. Of course, when we found the skull, which I knew was going to be there, it was so obvious how big she was and how really in many ways perfect she was. Every time we would uncover a bone it would just amaze me. There was nothing about that find that was disappointing. It was just always more and more and more excitement.”
For 17 days Larson and his four-strong team – his brother, Neal; Terry Wentz, the fossil preparator; and Susan Hendrickson, a volunteer at the BHI who’d first spotted the bones – worked to uncover the rest of the Tyrannosaurus rex. They used picks and shovels to dig down 30 ft into the cliff, as the mercury rose to 46 degrees Celsius.
By the time they had finished, the unbelievable truth had been confirmed: this, the 13th Tyrannosaurus rex ever found, was by far the largest and most complete. Only the smaller bones were missing; whereas other Tyrannosaurus rexes had been at most 40 per cent complete, this one was more than 90 per cent. They named her Sue, in honour of the woman who’d led to her discovery.
When the team had finished their work, they handed over a cheque for $5,000 to Maurice Williams, the Sioux Indian rancher who owned the land, which was in the heart of the Cheyenne River Indian Reservation. For the next two years – during which 2,000 people would visit the Black Hills Institute to look at Sue, among them about 30 scientists and palaeontologists – they prepared Sue for display. The plan was to install her at their museum, turning the small town of Hill City into a national – even global – destination for dinosaur-lovers.
Peter Larson (second from left) and Susan Hendrickson (third from left) at the dig site for Sue (ALLSTAR / LIONSGATE)
As they prepared her bones, they got to understand more about Sue’s life and death. “You could see things that happened to her,” says Larson. “Her left fibula was shattered and then partially healed, but continuously through her life she had this bacterial infection going on that would have caused her probably to limp. She had perforations in her jaws; you can imagine her fighting perhaps with another T rex for territory, or as a young animal. We saw snapshots of this living animal, not just this dead pile of bones.”
In May 1992 Terry Wentz painstakingly winched up the pelvis of the T rex, which had been covering the creature’s huge skull. It was a delicate operation and, for Wentz, it was “probably the highest point of my life”.
And, indeed, from there it was all downhill. On the morning of May 14, the FBI arrived with a warrant to seize Sue. Thirty agents descended upon the building, and, over the course of three days, they took Sue away, along with dozens of boxes full of other fossils (Larson estimates that they only ever received 20 per cent of these back). The charge was simple: stealing property from federal land. The handshake agreement with Maurice Williams was worthless, it turned out, because, although he owned the land, it was being held for him in trust by the Bureau of Indian Affairs.
READ: Living fossil found in China
Every day, local people turned out to protest about the seizure; eventually, about 20,000 people would sign a petition to “Save Sue”. The charged atmosphere even affected the people who were there to enact the warrant: “I remember the nice lady from the National Guard who was loading Sue’s skull; the tears were just pourin’ out of her eyes,” says Larson. “The emotions were raw with everybody, and they just overtook her, too.”
For the next few years, Sue would reside in Rapid City, at the South Dakota School of Mines and Technology – a place that happened to be Peter Larson’s alma mater. During the trial that followed the seizure, Larson would often stand outside the facility where Sue was being stored, and talk to her. “Mostly I was trying to reassure her that she wasn’t going to rot in that case, that I was going to get her out of there,” he says in the film.
When it came down to it, Larson failed. “We thought we had an excellent case,” he says. “We thought that, as personal property, [Williams] had the right to sell her. But the judge ruled that Sue was land, so he couldn’t sell her [without the permission of the Bureau of Indian Affairs]”. In February 1993, a judge ruled that Sue belonged to Williams. Four years later, Williams would sell her at auction to the Field Museum of Natural History, Chicago, for $8.36 million, making her the most valuable dinosaur in the world.
Meanwhile, Larson and the Black Hills Institute were being indicted on charges of wire fraud, money laundering, transportation of stolen property and a mess of other indictments arising from their activities in the fossil market. Larson was convicted of four minor violations, with a recommended sentence of six months. The judge, Richard Battey, gave him an “enhanced sentence” of two years. (Larson remains convinced that Battey held a grudge against him because he asked Battey to recuse himself from the case.)
Battles have been waged over dinosaurs since they were first discovered and classified in the early 19th century. Two of the great American palaeontologists of the mid-19th century, Edward Cope and Othniel Marsh, fought bitterly over the fossils they found, resorting to theft and bribery while they fired potshots at each other in the pages of learned journals. Along the way, they also discovered dozens of new dinosaurs, including the first specimens of stegosaurus and triceratops.
In Britain there was a more genteel tradition of amateur fossil-hunting, embodied most famously by Mary Anning (1799-1847). Anning scoured the base of the cliffs near her home in Lyme Regis, and helped to discover the first complete ichthyosaur when she was only 12 years old. She is supposedly the subject of the tongue-twister “She sells sea shells by the seashore” and, in her collection and selling of fossils, she is the spiritual forebear of Peter Larson and other commercial fossil-hunters.
In the States, however, and especially in recent years, a schism has emerged between academic palaeontologists and their commercial and amateur counterparts. “In the US it’s very divided compared to what it is in the UK,” says Dr Phillip Manning, a professor of natural history at the University of Manchester. “In the UK, one of the highest awards you can get from the Palaeontological Association is the Mary Anning award, and of course she was a professional collector: she sold fossils. In the US, in the last 10 years especially, there has been this change in attitude, that people who collect fossils are evil, if they sell them.”
One vocal representative of this line of thinking is Dr Thomas Carr, associate professor of biology at the Lutheran Carthage College in Kenosha, Wisconsin. Carr has argued for the use of “eminent domain” – akin to a compulsory purchase order – when it comes to significant fossil findings. “A fossil could be seized for public use (i.e. science, education),” he wrote in a blog posting in November 2013, “reposited in a museum where it can be accessed by scientists and the public, and the collectors compensated for the expense they took to collect the fossil.”
READ: Dinosaurs walked Earth '243 million years ago'
Many of the more conservative elements in the world of palaeontology share Carr’s views. Commercial and amateur fossil-hunters, they argue, don’t truly understand the value of what they collect; they are too driven by money, or the selfishly acquisitive urge of the collector.
There’s no doubt that there is a seamy side to fossil-hunting. In June, Eric Prokopi, a Floridian commercial palaeontologist, was jailed for three months for illegally importing and selling a Mongolian dinosaur, the Tyrannosaurus bataar; in 2006, four tons of fossilised dinosaur eggs and petrified pine cones and crabs were seized by US authorities from the annual Tucson Gem and Mineral Show. The fossils, worth around $400,000 (£240,000), were returned to Argentina, from where they had been pilfered.
But there are others, such as Larson, who treat their work as almost a sacred duty. “When you’re digging one of these animals,” he says, “it’s very much like if we were uncovering a mass grave of humans. This was a living entity that needs to be treated with great respect. It has things to tell us, so it’s kind of a crime scene investigation, and you have to do it soberly, with humility, because this is a very special thing that you’re able to do.”
Although Larson is only now studying for his PhD in palaeontology – under the supervision of Dr Phil Manning – he has always attempted to collect all the relevant scientific information during his digs. At the same time as he and his fellow Black Hills people were excavating Sue, Dr Jack Horner, professor at the University of Montana, scientific adviser on the Jurassic Park films, and just about the most famous palaeontologist in the US, was conducting his own Tyrannosaurus rex dig. His crew of 10 took five weeks to do what Larson’s group of four did in fewer than three.
Once a dinosaur is put up for sale, there is the danger that it might disappear forever into a private collection – large fossils have long been coveted by wealthy individuals and everyone from Microsoft multi-millionaire Nathan Myhrvold to the actor Nic Cage have spent considerable sums to install them in their homes.
In 1956, the fossilised remains of Archaeopteryx lithographica were discovered in a quarry in Germany owned by a man named Eduard Opitsch. The archaeopteryx was one of the first true birds, and, as Opitsch’s was only the third to be discovered, its scientific value was almost incalculable. For almost 20 years he allowed palaeontologists to study the fossil but, in 1974, he took it back from the museum in which it had been stored and studied. When Opitsch died, 17 years later, the fossil was nowhere to be found; whether sold or stolen, it had indubitably vanished.
The thought of fossils disappearing from sight is what frightens academics such as Thomas Carr, who describes them as “non-renewable resources”. Carr has written that auctions of dinosaur fossils are “flagrant and public humiliations of science”. That museums and universities might be priced out of bidding is, to Carr, a moral aberration.
Larson takes a different view: “Sue sold for $8.36 million. Look at how many paintings sell for more than $100 million. If you want to find the money, the money’s there.” (And, of course, it was a museum that bought Sue.)
During Larson’s time in prison, the Black Hills Institute barely managed to stay afloat. “We were able to stay alive because we had some wonderful museums which made purchases in support of us,” he says. “It was just awesome. I answered almost 1,997 letters for the 18 months I was in Florence, from people who supported me.”
When he returned to work he was demoralised, but not broken. “I was very unhinged for, I suppose it was really six months,” says Larson. “It was certainly a year before I was back to being able to accomplish tasks in a meaningful way.”
Five years ago, new legislation came into force to control the collection of fossils on public land. The Omnibus Public Land Management Act states that while amateurs or commercial fossil collectors can pick up invertebrate fossils (molluscs, worms, sponges, corals and so on) on public land, they are not permitted to do the same with vertebrate fossils.
This sort of legislation is anathema to Larson. He remembers finding his first fossil, aged four; it was a dinosaur tooth, and it sparked the interest that has kept him going for the past 40 years. “Amateurs are the ones who make all the discoveries,” he says. “It’s like astronomy; you need lots of eyes to find things. You see something that causes you to dig.”
What does he think would have happened to Sue if the Black Hills Institute hadn’t found her? “She would not have been found, no way. Because of the rate of erosion that was occurring on that cliff face, I estimate that today the pelvis would be gone, and the front half of the skull. All the teeth, gone. It would still have been important, but it would have been half a skeleton now.”
Since they found Sue, Larson and his fellow fossil-hunters have gone on to discover nine more T rexes, and, despite all the acrimony over their greatest ever find, Larson still loves what he does. “There are people who’ve entered the business for a short time thinking that they were going to get rich; well, they quickly find out that that’s not the case,” he says. “You have to be willing to survive on very little. And so it’s a labour of love. Those of us who do this – and in academia, too – most of the people who study fossils fell into love with dinosaurs when they were kids. We all have Peter Pan syndrome: we just never grew up.”
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