$7,600,000. fair warning. 7,600,000. up here. [ cheers and applause ] once the bidding was done, you didn t know immediately who it was. everyone s looking around, saying okay, who s going to come forward. the bidding was exciting, despite the fact that i was horrified that it was happening. i raised my paddle twice and then i was out of it. there it went. completely shocking sue sold that fast and the price went that high. i wasn t shocked that it went that high. i think it s worth more than that. it s the most, by far, any fossil had ever sold for. and although i m sad, i m very sad we couldn t get it, i was thinking, okay, this is a statement about black hills institute and the people. you guys did a good job. your new home on the shores of lake michigan.
there are some people in this profession that really, truly believe that it is, there s something morally wrong with selling a fossil. i was indoctrinated as an undergrad, that if you don t have a ph.d, you have no right to a collect dinosaurs. and i heard about them. phi and peter larson collecting fossils and i was told, these are pirates! and i visited pete larson and i visited the black hills institute. and they weren t pirates at all. they had techniques they taught my crew. they were better than my crew. you have academias and these fiefdoms. and now here s these really great paleontologists that don t need that system. back in the day in the early 1900s commercial directors, quote unquote, were filling museums with pesmspecimens and hand in hand with, quote, academic people. that was an okay relationship. around in the 70s and 80s, that changed. 1980s, we re already seeing this schism between professional commercial collectors versus professional research collectors.
started this business called black hills minerals as this earth science supply house. eventually my younger brother neal, who was also a student at the school of mines, and bob farrar, one of his classmates, started working with us as well. with the three of us all going to the school of mines, we were problems there, because all of us chose not to go into industry. the first year was terrible, the second year was not so good but it was sort of turning into a business. as we kept going, we kept collecting more and more fossils and had the idea of it probably would work to sell these as display specimens. in 1978, we were going pretty strong. we were selling mostly fossils. we were going out and doing geological exploration. so by 1979, we created this new entity called black hills institute of geological research, incorporated, in the center of the black hills. we got sue back to hill city. we moved the big blocks into the warehouse, actually built a room around where we had put
evidence around that fossil to see whether there s something there that s wrong, chargeable, what more needs to be investigated. fbi agents arrived here in hill city. they presented the black hills institute with a court order. that order demanded the release of more information. but the people at the institute have another name for it. they call it harassment. it should not be allowed to happen. this is the united states of america. so far, no criminal charges have been filed in the case. members of the institute say they re innocent and are hoping that a new administration will put an end to their legal fight over sue. institute officials thought their problems were over when kevin schieffer was replaced as u.s. attorney, but apparently they continue to be the target of the federal government. we have a federal search warrant issued by the u.s. district court and we re serving a search warrant. the enormous amount of money the government is spending to put one person or o
the federal government took the position that he had no authority himself to enter into an agreement with the black hills institute. peter realized that he could not have his fossil back. he was devastated. the judge decided that sue was real estate. sue the fossil was real estate. i first got involved in the dinosaur case, as we call it, sometime late 1992, early 1993. of course they re not going to like what we re doing. that s the nature of what we do. but hopefully in the broader spectrum, people can look at it