Transcripts for CNN Dinosaur 13 20141221 02:20:30 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.
and say, well, i m glad people can t just go out into the forests or out on to the parks and take these fossils, or in this particular case, or steal stuff off of land, and somebody s going to do something about it. well, we re the somebody that does something about it. after the seizure of the sue specimen, we continued to look at this issue, not from a park service jurisdiction perspective, but more from the circumstances of business practices in terms of collecting on public lands. you really can t do anything in any kind of a business without money. what monetary transactions happened during the time that this enterprise had this fossil and then what did they do with that fossil. sell it? what happened to that money. and then how we can assemble the
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
at the time. judge batty held that a fossil, unlike an archaeological find, had become the bones had become mineralized, therefore the fossil was land. an individual indian cannot sell land that the government holds in trust for him without the permission of the federal government to begin with. so that s what ended it. fossils are land. judge battey said actually in his filing that the sale was null and void.
and can t be harvested that s paleontological. you can be all right in this quarter section but if you get off a little bit remember, this is before gps. you get off a little bit to the wrong place, you might be dealing with a whole other set of regulations. the tribe claimed that because morris williams being a member of the tribe had not purchased a $100 permit to sell something, the fossil should be forfeited and therefore they owned the fossil. and of course the government said that it was government property and that that was because of the trust land issue. the seizure and the subpoena were the brainchild of acting u.s. attorney kevin schieffer. he was a controversial figure as u.s. attorney because he hadn t had a lot of experience practicing law. he had the ability to drive some