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
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 moved anything around yet. we ve just been looking at it and taking some pictures and trying to figure out how to proceed. there s a real mass of bones here. some are caught up in concretion, but most appear to be really excellently preserved. and i believe that the tail s going that way and the skull is going this way, but we re just going to have to dig it up and see. collecting fossils is something that s very timely. fossils are discovered because they re weathering out, because the forces of nature, rain, winds, freezing, thawing, even snowfall, have an effect on that fossil. every day that it s outside is a day that it s going to destruction. we started by p
Last phase of getting sue out of the ground, we used basically egyptian techniques to get this large block. i mean, we had one of the blocks weighed probably something close to 10,000 pounds. there was probably about ten ton of material, total, that we had to load up. once we had the skull and pelvic block and the tail vertebrae and everything else, we knew we could haul a lot of the stuff on our bobcat trailer. we had no idea how we were going to be able to get all these other things. well, my brother john had built a tandem-axle trailer earlier that year. with that and the other pickup truck that we had there, we were able to load the fossil up. after we had built pallets underneath the fossil, we were able to scooch some plywood underneath them so that we could
Last phase of getting sue out of the ground, we used basically egyptian techniques to get this large block. i mean, we had one of the blocks weighed probably something close to 10,000 pounds. there was probably about ten ton of material, total, that we had to load up. once we had the skull and pelvic block and the tail vertebrae and everything else, we knew we could haul a lot of the stuff on our bobcat trailer. we had no idea how we were going to be able to get all these other things. well, my brother john had built a tandem-axle trailer earlier that year. with that and the other pickup truck that we had there, we were able to load the fossil up. after we had built pallets underneath the fossil, we were able to scooch some plywood
Broken and healed bones all over 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 jath 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