Transcripts for CNN Dinosaur 13 20141212 04:13:15 archive.org - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from archive.org Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
hills institute s fossil? every single filing the institute made, i really believed would win, because it was so clear, they had purchased it, he had accepted the check, he had been on videotape talking about it. it was very clear that he thought he had sold the fossil at the time. judge batty held that a fossil, unlike an archaeological find, had become the bones had become mineralized, therefore the fossil was land. an individual indian cannot sell land that the government holds in trust for him without the permission of the federal government to begin with. so that s what ended it. fossils are land.
and we haven t started digging or haven t moved anything around yet. we ve just been looking at it and taking some pictures and trying to figure out how to proceed. there s a real mass of bones here. some are caught up in concretion, but most appear to be really excellently preserved. and i believe that the tail s going that way and the skull is going this way, but we re just going to have to dig it up and see. collecting fossils is something that s very timely. fossils are discovered because they re weathering out, because the forces of nature, rain, winds, freezing, thawing, even snowfall, have an effect on that fossil. every day that it s outside is a day that it s going to destruction. we started by picking up all these thousands of fragments of bones and bagging them, labeling them. well, the plan of attack is to protect the specimen first of
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
different issues through the years, but the newest fight is over a dinosaur. it was a big story and a very unusual story. come in and seize sue, everything exploded. controversy tonight. controversy surrounding the institute and their most famous discovery. it may be the custody battle of the century. scientists, indians, the u.s. government. you find any fossils, the government may take them away. not only has he taken this dinosaur away, but he s taken our research away too, every photograph, every record we had about this dinosaur and the locality where she was found. sue was seized pursuant to a search warrant, but there was never a crime charged. pat and i talked about filing suit. you know, we sued the federal government for return of our property. the black hills institute said it purchased the fossil from maurice williams. originally maurice williams said that too, but then he changed his claim, and he said he had not sold the fossil and that he