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the intensity reaction, while the court case was going on, really surprised me. there were people that i thought were quite reasonable people, who basically said things about black hills that just were not true. there s a difference between the academic perspective of fossil collecting and the commercial perspective. there are some people in this profession that really, truly believe that it is, there s something morally wrong with selling a fossil. i was indoctrinated as an undergrad, that if you don t have a ph.d, you have no right to a collect dinosaurs. and i heard about them. phi and peter larson collecting fossils and i was told, these are pirates! and i visited pete larson and i visited the black hills institute. and they weren t pirates at all. they had techniques they taught my crew. they were better than my crew. you have academias and these fights, and now here s these ....
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 ....
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. ....
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 ....
Private room, up above the auction area, so he could watch everything going on. sotheby s had arranged for one of the people who would normally be taking bids to give me a running detail on the telephone about what was happening at the auction. i was at the institute, too. i could not bear to listen to the phone. it was too much. good morning, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to sotheby s. we have for auction today the fossil of a tyrannosaurus rex known as sue. the property of the united states of america in trust of morris williams of south dakota. and now let us, if we re all ready, begin the competition for sue the tyrannosaurus rex. and i now begin with a bid of ....