since sue was seized by federal agents in 1992, the fossil has been stored at the school of mines. my first contact with mr. morris williams is when he came to aberdeen for a series of meetings to discuss what he should do with this fossil. the idea that i had was to convene like a panel of paleontologists to do an in-depth study of this fossil with the hopes that it would end up in a museum somewhere. but in the meantime, while this is being discussed, mr. williams decided that he would rather sell the fossil. morris williams had a stack of proposals from all sorts of people, all over the place. everybody wanted it. i called up morris and i said, i can come out to south dakota if you want and i ll visit with you. and he said, great, and actually visited the boxes in which sue
well, that s wire fraud. and then if the japanese museum were to purchase that fossil and the guys would put that money in the bank, that s money laundering. so basically the guys were called conspirators, who were creating this very elaborate scheme to intentionally steal things and sell them illegally. what struck me about the prosecution s case was how complex it was. people had to understand the arcane ins and outs of bringing travelers checks into the country and latitudes and longitudes on public lands. and i think they did it in an organized way, but it was a very, very complicated argument. the holiday season is here,
out there, you need landmarks to find your way around, and i said, okay, it s foggy. you can t see. make sure you don t walk in a circle. and, like, two hours later, i was right back where i started, and i could not believe it. i just couldn t believe it, cause i was, like, trying so hard to walk straight. it was like, i felt really stupid. believe it was the next day we went back with the video camera and just kind of re-enacted, you know, how i found her. anybody who had any idea what a fossil versus a rock was would have seen it, because there was a lot of broken bones dribbling down. about eight foot up the side of the cliff, there were three articulated vertebrae and a couple other pieces of bones sticking out. from the debris pile, i picked up scraps that showed the hollowness and took it with, because i knew if i went back to where they were working, they wouldn t believe me.
well, it took me a day to get everything ready, and i came up, and i got up there with all these materials, and he took me over to this big cliff, and he said, take a look. and i looked at it, and i looked at him. i said, is that t-rex? he said, yes, and i think it s all here. 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 p
dinosaurs, for me, are still one of the most amazing creatures ever to have lived on the planet. you re touching something that was alive 65, 100, or three or more hundred million years ago. when you pick up a fossil, and you re the first ever human being to touch the remains of that organism, it s a remarkable feeling. dinosaurs are iconic animals. they represent paleontology in general. they represent science. dinosaurs lived for 150 million years, and they dominated the world for that long, and yet humans have only been around for three, four, or five. what are our chances? we seem to be approaching these big problems. most of what is to be learned about the history of life is yet to be discovered. what s still out there? what s still in the ground? what some kids might find will