$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.
started this business called black hills minerals as this earth science supply house. eventually my younger brother neal, who was also a student at the school of mines, and bob farrar, one of his classmates, started working with us as well. with the three of us all going to the school of mines, we were problems there, because all of us chose not to go into industry. the first year was terrible, the second year was not so good but it was sort of turning into a business. as we kept going, we kept collecting more and more fossils and had the idea of it probably would work to sell these as display specimens. in 1978, we were going pretty strong. we were selling mostly fossils. we were going out and doing geological exploration. so by 1979, we created this new entity called black hills institute of geological research, incorporated, in the center of the black hills. we got sue back to hill city. we moved the big blocks into the warehouse, actually built a room around where we had put
we were just finishing up doing stuff, and susan comes up. and she opens her hand, and she s got two pretty small pieces of bone, only about this big, in her hand. and i d never seen the inside of a t. rex vertebra before, but i knew exactly that was what she had in her hand, and i says, is there more of it? she said, there s a lot more. so we ran, literally ran back to the site. crawl up on the cliff face, and i see three articulated vertebrae, and from that point on, i m absolutely certain this is going to be the best thing we ever found and it s going to be a complete t. rex. he called up and said, neal, i need you to bring a lot of plaster two-by-fours. 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
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town had. it was our dinosaur. it was our museum. it was our lives that had been just torn to pieces. i was in france, and they called me, and, you know, i thought it was a joke. couldn t believe it, and i cried. i was highly emotional, but from that moment that i heard that the specimen was going to be taken, my focus was on the specimen. legally and all that other crap, that s not my concern. my concern was make sure that dinosaur was going to transport, everything was going to be safe. sue belonged here, and what happened was not right.