just leave me alone, right? but everybody was in there. there would be schoolkids in there. or another day, there d be, you know, some scientist guys coming along in there. i mean, pete had, like, 30 scientists working on a major new monograph on tyrannosaurus rex, so you got to suck it up. pete wants it this way. he wants this specimen available to everybody. it was so beautiful. just the preservation was incredible. it was just, wow. everybody knew about sue. we hadn t made any secret of the fact that we d collected her. we had 2,000 visitors sign this little guest book that went way in the back in our warehouse to see the skull of sue. i was just totally flaber gasted when i saw the specimen. specimen.bergasted when i saw t specimen. first of all, the size is just so imposing. but what i was more amazed by
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
They noticed the police tape. all a sudden, there were people with signs out in front of our building. it was clear that people were not happy with what was going on. the protests developed very quickly, so there were a lot of people on the street. i was working for national geographic, and we were gonna take the skull of sue and put it into a cat scan of what they use for the space shuttles to see if we could see inside the skull of sue. and terry wentz answered the phone, and he said, well, i don t think so, so i got on the next plane i could, and the place was surrounded by cops. i mean, you thought that there was like a real t-rex loose on the property. the next day in they brought reinforcements, a lot more people. the idea was that we were going to load this stuff up and haul it somewhere. and when the director of military support, one of the colonels got down there, he called and said, hey, general, this is not what we expected. this is a media event. we got schoolk
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 picking up all these thousands of fragments of bones and bagging them, labeling
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 re going, oh my god. look at this thing. look how huge it is. this has gotta be bigger than the one at the american museum. it s huge. it s wonderful. we had started a long time ago naming particular dinosaurs, and the name sue, for susan hendrickson, goes down in history, and i think that s a kind of a cool way to reward those amateurs who make these discoveries.