For the sake of Sue - Tyrannosaurus rex - Cover Story

Science News, Nov 11, 1995 by Richard Monastersky

Even by a dinosaur's standards the Tyrannosaurus rex named Sue must have led an unusually difficult life. Its huge skeleton has scars aplenty, bearing witness to several life-threatening injuries sustained more than 65 million years ago. One leg shows a healed- over fracture, the skull has gouges along its side, and a tooth fragment remains embedded in a rib, the remnant of some distant combat with another T. rex.

These wounds can't compare, however, to the tribulations the dinosaur has suffered since fossil collectors first dug it up in August 1990 on land owned by a South Dakota rancher named Maurice Williams. Its bones sparked a legal battle over ownership that raged all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court. And for the last 3 years, it has remained incarcerated in a dinosaur dungeon-a garage at the South Dakota School of Mines in Rapid City.

Reputedly the biggest and most complete T. rex skeleton known, Sue attracts great scientific interest. But those attributes also make this dinosaur a desirable commodity on the fossil market. Williams, who emerged as the winner of the ownership battle, has received offers of up to $60 million for the skeleton and is now trying to figure out what to do with it.

Paleontologists, meanwhile, are trying to sort out what the case can teach them. The controversy fueled a long-standing feud between commercial fossil collectors and academic researchers, who see themselves as competitors for a limited resource. Congress may weigh in with legislation that changes the rules on fossil collecting.

The case of Sue began 5 years ago, when Williams met Peter Larson, a commercial collector and president of the Black Hills Institute of Geological Research, a company dealing in fossils. At the time, Larson was looking for fossils on property adjoining Williams' ranch near Faith. Williams says he invited Larson over to look for fossils.

While searching Williams' property on Aug. 12, 1990, a member of Larson's team named Susan Hendrickson spotted a piece of T. rex bone in the side of the hill. The fossil, which became known as Sue, was apparently that of a female T. rex.

Larson claims that he immediately asked Williams for permission to excavate the fossil. Two weeks later, when his team uncovered the dinosaur's skull, Larson gave Williams a check for $5,000 to purchase the skeleton. The check had "for theropod Sue" written on the bottom, says Patrick K. Duffy, Larson's attorney.

But Williams offers a different version of the story, saying that he told Larson the fossil couldn't be sold without government approval because it was found on "trust" land-real estate held in trust for Williams by the federal government. The trust agreement protects the interests of Indian landowners by giving the government oversight of the land.

Williams denies that he reached any sort of agreement with Larson over the sale of the dinosaur. In fact, he says, Larson handed over the check without an explanation. "I asked him what the check was for and he didn't choose to answer," Williams told Science News. "We just considered it [was] for the right to search or for damage to the land."

In any case, Williams deposited the check and kept the money. Larson, meanwhile, packed up and took the specimen, which he knew was probably worth hundreds of thousands of dollars, if not millions. After transporting the skeleton back to the Black Hills Institute, Larson announced that he would build a museum around it.

When a local newspaper reported the discovery and word of its tremendous value circulated, the legal struggles began. The Cheyenne River Sioux claimed ownership of the fossil because it was found within the reservation boundary. Williams asserted his right to the T. rex because it came from his land. All the while, the Black Hills Institute had possession of Sue and was putting hundreds of hours of labor into preparing it for display-a process that involves carefully removing the rock matrix from the fossil.

U.S. Attorney Kevin Schieffer stepped into the case on May 13, 1992, with a search warrant to seize Sue as evidence in a criminal case against Larson and his colleagues. The next day, National Guardsmen and FBI agents raided the institute, removing Sue and many other specimens and documents. Schieffer subsequently justified the seizure as a means of protecting public access to the fossil, which he feared Larson was preparing to sell.

The institute sued the Department of Justice for the return of the T. rex, but the U.S. District Court ruled against Larson's group. In the court's opinion, the fossil represented a piece of real estate and could not be sold without involving the U.S. Department of the Interior, the trustee of Williams' land. Therefore, the fossil remained the property of Williams' trust, a decision upheld when the U.S. Supreme Court decided not to consider the appeal.

Schieffer never used the skeleton as evidence in a criminal case. But in 1993, a grand jury indicted Larson and other institute officers on 39 felony counts. The indictments portrayed Larson as an unscrupulous dealer who stole fossils from government land and lied to private landowners in order to search their property for valuable bones.