Transcripts for CNN Dinosaur 13 20141215 04:46:15 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.
[ applause ] that moment, when we made that separation, that was probably the highest point of my life. how was that? champagne. hide it. hide it. there has to be a toast. who toasts? this whole i don t know. cheers. just, cheers. you ready? ready. sue. to old sue. sue. sue. yeah. yeah. it s very good champagne. look at this. i know. we were riding on top of the world. we had everything going for us. less than a week after that, all hell broke loose.
was located in the south dakota school of mines. with morris family, who had never actually been there, this is the first time they d actually seen sue. what one really saw inside that sort of garage area was extraordinary, almost citizen cane vision of boxes and boxes and boxes. morris and i had numerous conversations. we talked about the responsibility involved in dealing with this extraordinary fossil. nothing quite like it had ever been sold before. it had to go to the right place, but adjudicating which place was the right place was complicated and the auction process, in fact, could help resolve that. we re going into court. we d already had an indication that the judge wasn t too pleased with us, because we d
and see what was going to happen to it. america s indian tribes have fought the white man over many different issues through the years, but the newest fight is over a dinosaur. it was a big story and a very unusual story. to have the federal government 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 owned it. mr. williams. pete and neal had made a deal with maurice williams for $5,000. on that saturday, the day before we finished getting sue out of the ground, that we gave maurice williams a check for $5,000, that said for theropod sue on the bottom of the check. even though $5,000 may not seem like a lot, it was a lot of money for our company to spend, and no one had ever paid that much for an undiscovered fossil before. we had lots of conversations with maurice williams about what was happening to the dinosaur. he knew that we were going to bring it back to hill city. he was completely in favor of that. he knew about the museum we were building. he knew we were going to be preparing the fossil. that s about the only ones that we have. how are you going to title this? the blah, blah, blah dinosaur?