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 giant hipbones off of the nose. we finally were able to lift
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 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
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 removing bones. you know, and every time somebody found a bone or 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
we would just work into the specimen, remove things that we could, protect the rest of it, and then take it out of the ground and get it back into the laboratory, where you can have a more controlled environment to take care of the specimen. the amount of new things that we found and the amount of scientific information that we discovered while finding sue was enormous. beautifully preserved. articulated skull, articulated vertebral column up to the pelvis with the tail and shoulder blade and all this stuff, and it s just like, holy cow. and wonderful preservation. just fantastic bones that were just beautiful surface on them. every time we were ready to take a bone out or every time there was some new discovery, pete would take this butcher paper out, and he mapped each and every bone one on one that we found, that was excavated.
out, and he mapped each and every bone one on one that we found, that was excavated. pete and i had quite a few discussions what would be fair. $5,000 is the most that anybody had ever given anyone for a dinosaur, for any fossil in the ground, so pete wrote a check out for him and a contract that he wanted maurice to sign. and i showed it to him, and he said, well, we don t need to sign anything. it s just something, a handshake between friends. and $5,000 is fine.