the perfect guy for me. and so despite the fact that i was writing about him and he should be my subject, i broke the first rule of journalism and fell in love with my subject. so we started dating and in our emotional ridiculousness, got married really quite quickly, within months of my moving here. but, it was okay. it was okay for what was going 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.
but there s only one more sue. in your life, you don t hope to find something that good, but we did. and it s still unbelievable to me. it was time for sue s unveiling, finally, which, of course, you can imagine, pete s most exciting moment to be able to be reunited with sue. he wasn t invited. we go through what happened and the negative of that, but there s another negative. it s the negative of what never
and we drove to hill city. they were supposed to take things related to sue, but they took everything. they went through all of our offices, all of our desks, all of our mail trays, taking mail opened, unopened. somebody called me and said the fbi s got crime scene tape around the institute, and they re taking sue. i hung up the phone, and i went as fast as i could down to the institute. i don t know how many agents they had, 30-some people or whatever. it was just insane. i didn t even think about it. i grabbed the tape and go under it. i just went to the specimen. that was my concern. i could just see these idiots, you know, just try to pack up my dinosaur and take it away and ruin it. how dare they? how dare these people do this? unconscionable. i can t imagine somebody being able to do this here in the united states of america, in a free country. in order to ensure that this dinosaur could be carefully packed up, we helped. it was pretty clear that they didn t know wh
have stayed in her hometown museum. if she wasn t going to be in black hills where she morally should be, field museum was a good place. this was just the kind of place that we felt sue had to go to. my reaction was relief that that s the best place, where the public and scientific community will have access to it. i think it s probably the second best place she could have been. it s going to go where millions of people would see her. she s not going to be in prison anymore. sue is free. and people can see her and they can get the same excitement that i have for her, and they can love her just like i do. to me, the dinosaur still belongs in hill city. he s the guy who can go out and find half a dozen more t-rexes,
really great paleontologists who don t need that system. back in the day in the early 1900s, collectors were, quote unquote, filling museums with specimens and working hand in hand, quote, academic people. that was an okay relationship. around in the 70s and 80s, that changed. 1980s, we re already seeing this schism between professional commercial collectors versus professional research clrkts. this race to discover the earth s past is a very exciting one and people want a piece of it. sue had back a living entity to me after all our work in the field and what we were finding out about her life. and i really missed her when she was gone. so one way that i was able to sort of help that was to go and visit her and to talk with her