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. you know, it was like a funeral, losing a family member. it just felt like a nightmare,
judge battey said actually in his filing that the sale was null and void. the federal government took the position that he had no authority himself to enter into an agreement with the black hills institute. peter realized that he could not have his fossil back. he was devastated. the judge decided that sue was real estate. sue, the fossil, was real estate. i first got involved in the dinosaur case, as we called it,
all right. yeah! that moment, when we made that separation, that was probably the highest point of my life. how was that? champagne. hide it. hide it. there has to be a toast. who toasts? this whole i don t know. cheers. just, cheers. you ready? ready. sue. to old sue. sue. sue. sue. yeah. yeah. it s very good champagne. look at this. i know. we were riding on top of the world. we had everything going for us. less than a week after that, all
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.
mostly, i was trying to reassure her that she wasn t going to rot in that case, that i was going to spring her free. somehow, i was going to get her out of there. as that whole custody battle unfolded, firstly, the tribe lost its own case in tribal court, which is pretty surprising. but evident that it was a bad claim. the government actually retracted its claim, because it realized it couldn t claim trust property. so then it comes down to two people. is it morris fossil or black