the intensity reaction, while the court case was going on, really surprised me. there were people that i thought were quite reasonable people, who basically said things about black hills that just were not true. there s a difference between the academic perspective of fossil collecting and the commercial perspective. 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 fights, and now here s these
along in there. i mean, pete had, like, 30 scientists working on a major new monograph on tyrannosaurus rex, so you got to suck it up. pete wants it this way. he wants this specimen available to everybody. it was so beautiful. just the preservation was incredible. it was just, wow. everybody knew about sue. we hadn t made any secret of the fact that we d collected her. we had 2,000 visitors sign this little guest book that went way in the back in our warehouse to see the skull of sue. i was just totally flaber gasted when i saw the specimen. first of all, the size is just so imposing. but what i was more amazed by was what a great job they were doing preparing the specimen. i d heard inklings that the black hills institute boys had found something. one of the first things i saw was actually, you know, part of the skull of sue still encased in matrix. 65 million years later, this animal really had the power to give you goose bumps. to see the look on pete s face and neil s,
judge battey said actually in his filing that the sale was null and void. 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 called it,
so in the courtroom, of course, right in front, is judge battey on the bench. off to the left is the jury, 12 jurors, 2 tralternates. a large space in between where the lawyers get to pace and walk and show exhibits and things. and then we had the prosecution, which at times had two or three lawyers. on our side, there was a lawyer for each defendant, so there were six lawyers, and five defendants. the sixth defendant, of course, being the black hills institute. our trial was, and still is, the largest criminal case that s ever been tried in south dakota. you cannot say the word sue in the trial. the jurors were going, what happened to sue? that s why they got these guys in the court system, right? the logistics of this trial were incomprehensible.
mostly, i was trying to reassure her that she wasn t going to rot in that case, that i was going to spring her free. somehow, i was going to get her out of there. as that whole custody battle unfolded, firstly, the tribe lost its own case in tribal court, which is pretty surprising. but evident that it was a bad claim. the government actually retracted its claim, because it realized it couldn t claim trust property. so then it comes down to two people. is it morris fossil or black