the protest developed very quickly, so there were a lot of people on the street. i was working for national geographic, and we were gonna take the skull of sue and put it into a cat scan of what they use for the space shuttles to see if we could see inside the skull of sue. and terry wentz answered the phone, and he said, well, i don t think so, so i got on the next plane i could, and the place was surrounded by cops. i mean, you thought that there was, like, a real t. rex loose on the property. the next day in they brought reinforcements, a lot more people. the idea was that we were going to load this stuff up and haul it somewhere. and when the director of military support, one of the colonels got down there, he called and said, hey, general, this is not what we expected. this is a media event. we got schoolkids out here. we got parents out here. what should we do? and i said, well, just go do it. don t be cruel, save! don t be cruel! save sue!
people around town noticed. they noticed all the cop cars. they noticed the police tape. all a sudden, there were people with signs out in front of our building it was clear that people were not happy with what was going on. the protest developed very quickly, so there were a lot of people on the street. i was working for national geographic, and we were gonna take the skull of sue and put it into a cat scan of what they use for the space shuttles to see if we could see inside the skull of sue. and terry wentz answered the phone, and he said, well, i don t think so, so i got on the next plane i could, and the place was surrounded by cops. i mean, you thought that there was, like, a real t. rex loose on the property. the next day in they brought reinforcements, a lot more people. the idea was that we were going to load this stuff up and haul it somewhere. and when the director of military support, one of the colonels got down there, he called and said, hey, general, this
last phase of getting sue out of the ground, we used basically egyptian techniques to get this large block. i mean, we had one of the blocks weighed probably something close to 10,000 pounds. there was probably about ten ton of material, total, that we had to load up. once we had the skull and pelvic block and the tail vertebrae and everything else, we knew we could haul a lot of the stuff on our bobcat trailer. we had no idea how we were going to be able to get all these other things. well, my brother john had built a tandem-axle trailer earlier that year. with that and the other pickup truck that we had there, we were able to load the fossil up. after we had built pallets underneath the fossil, we were able to scooch some plywood underneath em so that we could move it with chains and come-alongs and get it into the trailers.
we found out all kinds of cool things about this dinosaur. broken and healed bones all over the skeleton. this animal had a terrible life, 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
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.