$7,600,000. fair warning. 7,600,000. up here. [ cheers and applause ] once the bidding was done, you didn t know immediately who it was. everyone s looking around, saying okay, who s going to come forward. the bidding was exciting, despite the fact that i was horrified that it was happening. i raised my paddle twice and then i was out of it. there it went. completely shocking sue sold that fast and the price went that high. i wasn t shocked that it went that high. i think it s worth more than that. it s the most, by far, any fossil had ever sold for. and although i m sad, i m very sad we couldn t get it, i was thinking, okay, this is a statement about black hills institute and the people. you guys did a good job. your new home on the shores of lake michigan.
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 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
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 fiefdoms. and now here s these really great paleontologists that don t need that system. back in the day in the early 1900s commercial directors, quote unquote, were filling museums with pesmspecimens and hand in hand with, quote, academic people. that was an okay relationship. around in the 70s and 80s, that changed. 1980s, we re already seeing this schism between professional commercial collectors versus professional research collectors.
Evidence around that fossil to see whether there s something there that s wrong, chargeable, what more needs to be investigated. fbi agents arrived here in hill city. they presented the black hills institute with a court order. that order demanded the release of more information. but the people at the institute have another name for it. they call it harassment. it should not be allowed to happen. this is the united states of america. so far, no criminal charges have been filed in the case. members of the institute say they re innocent and are hoping that a new administration will put an end to their legal fight over sue. institute officials thought their problems were over when kevin schieffer was replaced as u.s. attorney, but apparently they continue to be the target of the federal government. we have a federal search warrant issued by the u.s. district court and we re serving a search warrant. the enormous amount of money the government is spending to put one person or o
Been stored at the school of mines. my first contact with mr. maurice williams was when he came to aberdeen for a series of meetings to discuss what he should do with this fossil. the idea that i had was to convene like a panel of paleontologists to do an in-depth study of this fossil with the hopes that it would end up in a museum somewhere. but in the meantime, while this is being discussed, mr. williams decided that he would rather sell the fossil. morris williams had a stack of proposals from all sorts of people, all over the place. i mean, everybody wanted it. i called up morris and i said, i m going to come out to south dakota if you want and i ll visit with you. and he said great. and i actually visited the boxes in which sue was located in the south dakota school of mines.