we were all experienced diggers. you know, it was just total focused effort. 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.
i m used to fixing things, and this was unfixable. it was so stupid. once you start to understand the indictments, basically this is what they said. pretend we re in wyoming and we re standing in the middle of the prairie and let s assume for a moment that the fence is in the right place. you re standing on this side of the fence, the government says, right over there, on the other side of the fence, is this fabulous fossil. and they re basically saying that pete and neil and bob and whoever was out there would go step over the fence, wrongly, knowingly pick up the fossil, that they re not supposed to pick up, carry it back over the fence, put it in their car. when they drive from wyoming to south dakota, they then have conducted an illegal act, which is called interstate transportation of stolen property. they get back to the institute, they would make a phone call, send a fax, maybe, to japan and say, we found the thing that we that you were looking for. do you want to buy it?
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.
it totally blew me apart. i m used to fixing things, and this was unfixable. it was so stupid. once you start to understand the indictments, basically this is what they said. pretend we re in wyoming and we re standing in the middle of the prairie and let s assume for a moment that the fence is in the right place. you re standing on this side of the fence, the government says, right over there, on the other side of the fence, is this fabulous fossil. and they re basically saying that pete and neil and bob and whoever was out there would go step over the fence, wrongly, knowingly pick up the fossil, that they re not supposed to pick up, carry it back over the fence, put it in their car. when they drive from wyoming to south dakota, they then have conducted an illegal act, which is called interstate transportation of stolen property. they get back to the institute, they would make a phone call, send a fax, maybe, to japan and say, we found the thing that we were looking for. do you w
we got back after fixing the tire, and we were at the dig site. 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