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
I m happy with that. and, you know, that was the most that any landowner had ever gotten. we shook hands, and he was pretty excited about seeing it set up in the museum. 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 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.
when i was prepping sue, i was cloistred like a monk in the back corner of the back building. doing preparation, you just 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
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. first of all, the size is just so imposing. but what i was more amazed by was what a great job they were doing preparing the specimen. i d heard inklings that the black hills institute boys had found something. one of the first things i saw was actually, you know, part of the skull of sue still encased in matrix. 65 million years later, this animal really had the power to give you goose bumps. to see the look on pete s face and neil s,
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 them. well, the plan of attack is to protect the specimen first of