fragments, they just said, the s bone. we wouldn t say, skull. we didn t want to jinx it. pretty early on, i hit something hard, and so, i stopped. it s the s word, i said, thinking, i bet i hit the skull. when i got down digging and then started really working with the smaller knife, we found, as we were going down, is the back of the skull. and we re getting down, and here s this skull taking shape, and we get out on the side, and i put terry to work on cleaning the side of the skull, cause he s really our best preparator. pete let me work on part of the skull in the field, which was amazing. he s working and uncovering the teeth one by one by one. it was spectacular. teeth like this just sticking right out of the skull.
we were just finishing up doing stuff, and susan comes up. and she opens her hand, and she s got two pretty small pieces of bone, only about this big, in her hand. and i d never seen the inside of a t. rex vertebra before, but i knew exactly that was what she had in her hand, and i says, is there more of it? she said, there s a lot more. so we ran, literally ran back to the site. crawl up on the cliff face, and i see three articulated vertebrae, and from that point on, i m absolutely certain this is going to be the best thing we ever found and it s going to be a complete t. rex. he called up and said, neal, i need you to bring a lot of plaster two-by-fours. 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
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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!
every day that it s outside is a day that it s going to destruction. we started by picking up all these thousands of fragments of bones and bagging them, labeling them. well, the plan of attack is to protect the specimen first of all, and then you go above the specimen and dig down to it so that you can get all the way around it to remove it from the cliff. we basically used these ditch-digging tools, picks and shovels, to dig down that 30 feet from where i thought we could get back into the cliff face far enough to uncover what i thought would be the limits of that skeleton. probably the hardest work i ve ever had to do in my life. we were doing this all in temperatures around 115 degrees every day. it was very hard work, but it was very easy to put in a lot of energy into it, because we all wanted to see what the skeleton was going to look like. basically, we d take different sections so we weren t in each other s way and just kind of worked the specimen until we could start remo