CNN Dinosaur 13 December 21, 2014 02:41:30 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.
everything going on. sotheby s had arranged for one of the people who would normally be taking bids to give me a running detail on the telephone about what was happening at the auction. i was at the institute, too. i could not bear to listen to the phone. it was too much. good morning, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to sotheby s. we have for auction today the fossil of a tyrannosaurus rex known as sue. the property of the united states of america in trust of maurice williams of south dakota. and now let us, if we re all ready, begin the competition for sue the tyrannosaurus rex. and i now begin with a bid of $500,000. $500,000? $600,000? $700,000? at $700,000.
a terrible, rough life. the skull of sue had actually had the left side of the lower jaw had been literally ripped out of the socket, still held together here at the symphysis, where the two ends of the lower jaw come together in the front, but it s been torn loose from the socket which allows the jaw to open and close. and the postorbital, the bone directly behind the eye, was broken and pulled outwards and laying at sort of a weird angle, so i think that she actually died from the attack of another tyrannosaurus rex. that was a big job. i mean, it took me a year, literally a year just to, you know, remove individual bones from around the skull and then, and then to take that, the giant hipbones off of the nose. we finally were able to lift the pelvis off of sue s skull in the beginning of may 1992. taking that hip off of sue s skull was critical to doing it right, because you don t have a second chance. you okay there, terry? oh!
on there. and so we traversed this together and i had created for myself the additional burden of trying to be a journalist and separate my personal feelings from my job. two federal courts have sided with the government, saying sue should stay in the box, because there s no proof the dinosaur is being damaged there. in another federal court, they re still arguing over who actually owns the bones. the intensity of 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.
CNN Dinosaur 13 December 21, 2014 02:45:15 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.