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Tyrannosaurus Sue
The Extraordinary Saga of the Largest, Most Fought Over T-Rex Ever Found
Steve Fiffer
| | | | | | from TYRANNOSAURUS SUE by Steve Fiffer
After she was gone, after that dark, shocking day in May of 1992, when the armed FBI agents and Sheriff's officers and National Guardsmen had come and taken her away and locked her in a boiler room, he didn't forget her. When he wasn't talking to his lawyers about how to get her back, or the U.S. Attorney who had ordered her seizure, or the media, or the leaders of the Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe who also claimed her, when he wasn't talking to the technicians at NASA who'd been waiting for her, or the outraged scientists who couldn't believe she was gone, he'd climb into his 1981 Datsun pickup and drive the 30 miles from Hill City to Rapid City for a secret rendezvous.
Down Main Street and onto Highway 16, through the Black Hills past the turnoff for Mt. Rushmore, past the entrance to Bear Country, the Reptile Gardens, the water slides, the miniature golf courses and all the other attractions for the summer tourists until he reached a brick building at the South Dakota School of Mines and Technology. The building, part of the School's physical plant, housed boilers and other heating systems, as well as the 40 foot metal storage container in which she was being held. He could catch a glimpse of the container through an outside window. "I'd just stand there and talk to her," Peter Larson remembers. "I'd say, "We're gonna get you out of here, Sue. Be patient. Everything's going to be okay.'"
Larson, who was in his early 40s, did not expect Sue, a 67-million- year-old Tyrannosaurus rex, to respond. Dinosaurs only talk in movies or on television or in theme parks. Still, something in his bones told the paleontologist that he had to reassure Sue that she would survive this ordeal, this indignity, just as she had survived numerous battles with other dinosaurs while alive, just as her skeleton had survived millennia upon millennia of climactic change and chaos virtually intact.
Only eleven other Tyrannosaurus rexes had ever been discovered. She was the find of his life, the find of anyone's life--the largest, most complete (90 percent) T. rex ever unearthed. And while she could not talk, she had been telling him remarkable stories over the 21 months since his colleague Susan Hendrickson had first spotted her on August 12, 1990.
Her bones offered clues to determining her sex and the sex of other dinosaurs, as well as the usefulness of their upper appendages. Her fibula, which had been broken and then healed over, seemed to indicate that she had survived a crippling injury that would have rendered her unable to fend for herself for a lengthy period of time. Her partially damaged skull indicated she may have lost her life in combat. Foreign remains in her midsection even revealed her last supper before death--a duck-billed dinosaur. So to Larson, who had known he was going to be a paleontologist since he had found his first fossil at age four, Sue was alive in her own way. She had a name, she had a personality, and she had a history. She was, to him, at least, priceless.
***
As he took the podium at Sotheby's New York in Manhattan on October 4, 1997, David Redden, the auction house's Executive Vice President, had no idea what price "Lot 7045" would command. Nothing like this had ever been found, much less sold or auctioned, in the 253 years Sotheby's had been in business. But Redden, an unflappable Brit who has auctioned off everything from Mozart manuscripts to moon rocks, knew that the world would soon know the exact monetary value of the lot described in the Sotheby's catalog as, "a highly important and virtually complete fossil skeleton of a Tyrannosaurus rex ...popularly known as Sue." Bidding was to begin at $500,000.
Watching eagerly from a private room overlooking the standing room only crowd of 300 on the auction floor, Maurice Williams, the Native American who had consigned Sue to Sotheby's, was hoping for at least $1 million. Down on the floor itself, Susan Hendrickson prayed it wouldn't get too much higher than that. She knew that Peter Larson had a representative in the room who could only bid up to $1.2 million.
In the five and one half years since the government had seized the dinosaur from him, Larson had exhausted all of his emotional and financial resources to get her back. His passion for Sue, he believed, had led to a vendetta by the federal government that put him in prison for almost two years. Unable to attend the auction because the terms of his recent parole forbid him from leaving South Dakota, the paleontologist was monitoring the proceedings via cell phone.
A trio from Chicago's Field Museum--Richard Hunt, John McCarter, and Peter Crane--was also participating by phone, albeit one almost within shouting distance of Redden. Fearing that competitors' awareness of their interest in Sue might drive up the price, they had slipped unseen into a small room at Sotheby's just before the auction was to begin. They would communicate their bids by hotline to the house's president, Diana Brooks, who was situated below the podium to Redden's left.
Less secretive than the Chicagoans, but equally prepared for the hunt, representatives of several other museums as well as private foundations and wealthy individuals sat or stood on the floor, their weapons--small blue auction paddles--poised.
The United States government, which also had once laid claim to Sue, would not be bidding by paddle or phone. The government didn't care who in particular made the highest offer, but federal fingers were crossed hoping that the winner would keep the dinosaur in America. If some private collector or institution from Asia or Europe prevailed and took Sue overseas, Washington would be wiping the egg off its face for years to come.
"Good morning, ladies and gentlemen," Redden began. "We have for auction today the fossil of the T. rex known as Sue." The auctioneer tilted his head to the right, where Sue--or at least her chocolate-brown, five foot long, 900 pound skull--sat on a long white cushion.
Paleontologist Dr. Robert Bakker, enamored by Sue's charisma, once described her as, "the Marlene Dietrich of fossils." Sotheby's seemed to be treating her more like Madonna than Marlene, a rock star rather than chanteuse. Her image was posted on a huge screen above the stage, and a body guard stood by her side.
Redden took a deep breath, brought his gavel down, and the music began.
***
"Five hundred thousand dollars" said Redden. He let the figure roll off his tongue slowly. The surreal nature of the moment hadn't escaped him. The bidding had begun, and he and a dinosaur named Sue had entered the kind of Salvador Dali landscape you might expect to find on the Sotheby's auction block. On the floor, grounded in reality, Susan Hendrickson sensed that Peter Larson's angel's one million two might not be enough.
***
"It was foggy," she says. "It never gets foggy in South Dakota in the summer, but it was foggy that day." Although the rare mist prevented her from seeing her destination, Hendrickson set out with her dog on the seven mile hike to the cliff. "I told myself, ‘don't walk in a circle,' but that's just what I did." After two hours she found herself back where she had started.
"I started to cry," she confesses. Her failure to find the cliff was not the only cause for tears. During their time at the quarry, she and Larson had mutually agreed to break up.
Determined to find out what had been calling her, Hendrickson waited until the fog lifted and began the trek a second time. Two hours later she stood at the foot of the sixty foot high, buff-colored formation.
"It's not easy to find fossils," Larson says. "You're trying to figure out what's bone and what's not. You're seeing fragments and trying to imagine what they are, selecting which fragments are important. You have to have a good eye that can spot textural differences and color differences. Susan does."
Bakker adds: "There are some people who can find fossils and some who can't," he says. "Susan has the talent for getting a sense of place in a paleontological context. You must be born with it. She was. And she has honed it."
Hendrickson began her search by walking along the bottom of the cliff, eyes on the ground. "Usually you walk along the bottom to see if anything has dribbled down," she explains. "If you don't see anything, you walk along the middle of the formation if it's not too steep. And then you might walk a third time across the top, just to hit the different levels."
Halfway through her first pass at the bottom, she saw a "bunch of dribbled down bones." Where had they come from? Hendrickson looked up. "Just above eye level, about eight feet high, there it was: three large dinosaur vertebrae and a femur weathering out of the cliff. It was so exciting because they were very large and because of the shape. The carnivores like T. rex had concave vertebrae from the disk; it dips in. The herbivores--the triceratops or duckbills is what you almost always find--have very straight vertebrae. So I knew it was a carnivore. I knew it was really big. And therefore I felt it must be T. rex, but it can't be T. rex because you don't find T. rex."
***
When Hendrickson found what she thought might be T. rex number twelve, she tried to contain her excitement. "I didn't jump up and down and scream," she says. "But I was thinking, Wow. What was so cool was that the vertebrae were mostly going into the hill, so it looked like the potential for more. Usually you find the last little bit of bone and there's nothing more (because it has eroded). I knew this was part of one specimen, and that if the visible bones were all there was, it would have been important. But I knew there was more."
Hendrickson didn't disturb the bones in the cliff. She did, however, pick up a few pieces from the ground, each about one and a half to two inches across. "They were all hollow," she says. "I've picked up thousands of other pieces of bones before, and they were all solid." Theropods, the class of carnivorous dinosaurs which included T. rex, were hollow-boned like birds. The excitement building, Hendrickson flew back to camp.
She found Larson on his knees digging up the triceratops skull on Sharkey Williams' land. "Pete, I have to show you something," she said breathlessly.
"I had never seen T. rex vertebra, but I knew that's exactly what I was looking at," says Larson. How did Larson know Hendrickson had brought him T. rex vertebrae? "The size of the fragments, the curvature of the bone. The open spaces." He picks up a cervical vertebra from a T. rex found after Sue. "It's been waterworn before it was fossilized and you can see where the surface of the bone has been weathered away," he explains. "You can see these open spaces inside, kind of a honeycomb texture. That's exactly the same texture you find in bird bones and theropods--where birds come from. This is all connected to the respiratory system through the openings right here. There are air sacs, just like birds.I just knew what the fragments were."
"I'm a very analytical person. I don't believe in fate," she says as she checks her mud-spattered gray backpack to make sure that she has everything she needs to go hunting for dinosaurs on a warm, cloudless, late summer day in South Dakota. Her eyes as blue as the Great Plains sky, her face as resolute and weathered as the badlands she will soon be traversing, Hendrickson wears the same outfit she wore when she found Sue almost a decade earlier in this same fossil-rich formation--blue jeans, blue workshirt, and brown hiking boots. A silver-colored pick hangs from a leather belt around her waist like a six-shooter. Her hunting companion, a striking golden retriever named Skywalker, sits at attention by her side.
A field paleontologist since the mid-1980s, Hendrickson, who is approaching 50, is nothing if not down to earth. It is past ages, not the New Age, that move her. She searches for fossils, not herself. And yet…
"For two weeks this dinosaur was doing something to me, calling me. I didn't actually hear voices. But something kept pulling me there. Something wanted it to be me that went there and found her." (Bakker is not surprised when he hears this. "There's no such thing as an atheist in a dinosaur quarry," he laughs.)
It was August of 1990. Hendrickson, Larson, and other members of a team from Larson's Hill City, S.D.-based Black Hills Geological Institute, a commercial fossil hunting enterprise, were concluding a month's stay at the Ruth Mason Dinosaur Quarry near the small town of Faith in the northwest corner of the state. This was the fourth summer that Hendrickson had worked with the team. She had joined them after a spring spent searching for amber in the Dominican Republic.
Paleontology is only one of Hendrickson's passions. She is, perhaps, the world's leading procurer of amber and has been an underwater diver on expeditions that have found the lost city of Alexandria, Egypt, submerged by an earthquake and tidal wave in the fifth century; 16th century Spanish galleons that sank off Cuba and the Phillipines; and Napeolonic ships sent to the floor of the Nile by Admiral Nelson's fleet in 1798. "Sue is like Indiana Jones, an intrepid globetrotter," says Dr. David Grimaldi, Chairman of the American Museum of Natural History's Department of Entomology.
***
Hendrickson describes herself in simpler terms. "I'm just a person who loves finding things and learning everything about them," she says, adding she has little interest in possessing them. "It's the thrill of discovery. It's like the high from some drug. It lasts a few minutes. And it's addictive." She smiles. "Those moments are few and far between, but that's what keeps you going."
Hendrickson began looking for large fossils after meeting Swiss paleontologist Kirby Siber at a gem and mineral show in 1984. He invited her to help dig for prehistoric whales buried in what was once ocean and is now desert in Peru. There, in 1985, she met Larson.
The two soon became involved both professionally and romantically. On one of their first expeditions, they almost froze to death searching for meteorites in the Peruvian mountains. "We didn't have the right gear to stay up at that elevation overnight," Hendrickson says, "but we looked at each other and realized this was too good an opportunity to pass up."
In 1987, Hendrickson began helping Larson hunt for dinosaurs and other ancient fossils at the Mason Quarry. She was, says Larson, a quick study. "Susan loves to learn," he says. "She gets attached to a subject and reads everything and asks questions. I'm the kind of person who will tell you ten times more than you want to know about something. Well, she wants to know that."
Larson had plenty to tell. He had been collecting fossils since 1956, when at the age of four, he had spied a small brownish object in a ditch near the small farm on which he lived near Mission, South Dakota, some 200 miles southeast of Mount Rushmore. His parents brought him to Rapid City, where friends who ran a small geologic museum identified the find as the tooth of an oriodont, a camel-like mammal that lived 35 million years ago.
"From that day on, I knew I wanted to hunt fossils," he says. Within a few years, he and his younger brother Neal and their older brother Mark had collected enough fossils and rocks to open up a "museum" in one of the out buildings on their property, which lay within the borders of the Rosebud Indian Reservation. While other kids played cowboys and Indians, "we played curator," Larson says. They charged the adults in their family five cents admission.
By eighth grade, Larson had won the state science fair with an exhibit on fossils. "I was kind of a nerd," he confesses.
In 1970, he enrolled at the South Dakota School of Mines and Technology, one of the few schools he could afford to attend. There he majored in Geology only because there was no major in Paleontology. The pragmatic powers at the School pushed Larson and his fellow majors towards careers in private industry. "They wanted us to go where we could make money," Larson says. "Well, I wasn't interested in making money. I had no interest in drilling for oil. I wanted to hunt for fossils."
After graduating in 1974, Larson and fellow student Jim Honert went into business--finding small fossils, rocks, and minerals and selling them to colleges. Eventually the pair realized that colleges weren't the only institutions that wanted these teaching tools. Says Larson, "It became increasingly obvious that museums really needed the service, because they had no way to get them. They didn't have the funds to send full time people out searching for fossils or preparing fossils for exhibition."
The shift from hand specimens to museum pieces eventually sent Larson searching for the biggest fossil of all. In 1977, a museum in Vienna to whom Larson had sold an ancient turtle said it would like a dinosaur. By this time he was operating as the Black Hills Geologic Institute in partnership with his brother Neal and Bob Farrar, both graduates of the School of Mines. "We said, ‘No problem,'" Larson laughs, adding, "We didn't have a dinosaur. We didn't even know where to dig dinosaurs."
Two years later they journeyed to Faith, 150 miles northeast of Hill City, at the invitation of an octagenarian named Ruth Mason. Her land lies in a stretch of badlands called the Hell Creek Formation. As a young girl Ms. Mason had found what she thought were dinosaur bones on her property and had been trying to interest paleontologists in digging there since the early 1900s. The Larsons were the first to take her up on her offer.
***
On Mason's land, the Larsons soon found remains of the duck-billed dinosaur, Edmontosaurus annectens. And not just one dinosaur. Inexplicably, thousands of duck-bills had died there and were deposited as bone bed in the graveyard-quarry. Over the next decade, teams from the Institute worked the quarry, eventually reconstructing three specimens that brought more than $300,000 each from museums in Europe, Japan, and the United States.
Peter Larson did not limit his collecting to South Dakota. In the 1980s he began visiting South America. In 1985 the Institute and the Peruvian government entered into a partnership that yielded several scientifically important specimens, including a previously unknown marine sloth.
By 1990, the Institute had become one of the largest suppliers of museum specimens in the world and one of the largest employers in Hill City (population 700), with a full time staff of 11 working out of the former American Legion Hall on Main Street. The bright white, two story, Art Deco structure built by the WPA during the Depression housed the Institute's offices, library, fossil preparation lab, storage area, and gift shop, and featured a modest display floor/museum that attracted a small percentage of the 2 million tourists who came to the Black Hills each year to visit nearby Mount Rushmore. This museum had no T.rex. Rather, it exhibited considerably smaller finds such as a seven and one half inch tooth from a 60 foot long prehistoric shark and numerous colorful ammonites--extinct relatives of the chambered nautilus.
While the Institute sold some finds like the duck-bills for considerable amounts of money, none of the principals became wealthy. Excavation and reconstruction of specimens is extremely costly and can take years. As self-described "Republican paleontologists," the Larson brothers rejected the idea of applying for government grants because of their distaste for bureaucracy. Peter Larson, who lives in an old trailer a few yards from the Institute's back door, cites another reason for his barebones existence. "We set aside the best specimens for our own museum."
The Institute did not charge admission to this museum. "Education is the most important thing, and we don't believe people should have to pay for education," says Neal Larson. He and Peter and other Institute staffers give 30 to 60 school talks a year, taking their fossil displays around the entire Black Hills area. They also speak to amateur groups, rock clubs, and colleges and take people out collecting free of charge.
The Larsons, Hendrickson and an Institute crew that included Peter's son Matthew and Neal's son Jason, both teenagers, spent much of the summer of 1990 in the area around the Mason Quarry. Shortly after the fossil hunters arrived, they found a dead horse belonging to Maurice Williams, a Native American whose large cattle ranch lay just to the east of Ms. Mason's property. When Williams came by to claim the animal, he asked Peter Larson about the dig. "He was fascinated," says Larson. "He said, ‘I've got land with badlands on it, why don't you come over and look for dinosaurs.' I said, ‘Great. We don't pay a lot, but if we find something of significance, we'll pay you." Williams also suggested that Larson call his brother Sharkey, who owned similar land in the area. Sharkey Williams, now deceased, also invited the Institute to dig on his property.
While the Institute team initially found little on Maurice Williams' land, they did find a few partial triceratops skulls on his brother's property. On the morning of August 12, they were preparing to excavate a skull when they noticed a flat tire on their collecting truck. They changed the tire, but saw that the spare was also dangerously low on air. His tire pump broken, Larson decided to drive into Faith to get the two tires fixed. He invited Hendickson to join him on the 45 minute drive.
She declined. The dig was to end in a couple of days, and she wanted to explore the sandstone cliff that had been calling her ever since she had spied it from several miles away two weeks earlier. "I'd kept thinking, I gotta get over there," Hendrickson recalls, "but you're so tired, just physically exhausted at the end of the day." Maurice Williams had asked that they keep their vehicles off his property, so Hendrickson knew that she would have to walk to the cliff over rugged terrain. Now she finally had the time to do it.
At the time only eleven other T. rexes had ever been found.
***
Under no such illusion, Larson and Hendrickson quickly drove to Maurice Williams' fence line, then ran the additional two miles to the cliff. There, "Pete yelled and screamed," remembers Hendrickson.
The normally mild-mannered Larson admits he got excited. "Susan took me over to the spot, and there were literally thousands of little fragments of bone laying on the ground and some bigger pieces, and you could see there were parts of vertebra and we look up about seven feet up on the face of this cliff and there was this crosssection of bones about eight feet long coming out and I crawled up on there and we could see three articulated vertebrae. And I knew at that instant that it was all there. Call it intuition or whatever. I just knew. I knew this was gonna be the best thing that we'd ever found and probably would ever find."
After locating the cliff on a topographic map, Larson called his assistant Marion Zenker at the Institute and asked her to verify that Maurice Williams owned the land. Zenker called the land registrar for Ziebach County, where the ranch was located. The registrar told her that Maurice Williams owned the land and had leased the oil rights to Amoco. The registrar then offered a fragment of information that would later prove important: Because Williams was a member of the Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe on whose reservation the ranch was situated, his deed itself was on file with the Bureau of Indian Affairs, not at the county courthouse.
Larson called Williams that night. "I told him we had found something that looked really good," Larson says. Williams gave him permission to excavate, but still forbade him from driving onto the property. "I told Maurice, ‘It's big. We're going to have to drive on at least once to take it off,' and he said, ‘Okay,'" Larson remembers.
Larson wanted his brother Neal, who had gone home for the weekend, to see the site before the digging began.
"I was thinking I'd be coming back and we'd be closing up the quarry for the summer," Neal says. "Then I got a phone call from Peter on Saturday night."
"When you come back, I want you to bring lumber and plaster of Paris, and, oh, bring the trailer, too," Peter Larson said as non-chalantly as possible.
"What did you find, Pete, a skeleton?"
"You'll see."
Neal was hooked now. "What kind of skeleton? Is it a triceratops?"
"You'll see when you get here."
"Is it a duck bill?"
"You'll see." Older brothers haven't tormented younger brothers since the days dinosaurs roamed the earth--but only because there weren't any humans around then.
Neal Larson was anxious to learn what kind of skeleton had been found, but not anxious enough to leave for the quarry the next day. "It was Sunday, and I hadn't been to church for a few weeks," he explains.
Neal arrived in Faith on Monday August 14 with the trailer and all the other supplies on Peter's shopping list. By that time, Peter had christened the dinosaur, Sue, after Hendrickson, who to this day remains somewhat uncomfortable with the appellation. "I don't like the name Sue, but it was an honor," she says. "Of course, at that point it was just three articulated vertebrae. We didn't know how great she'd be."
Before Neal's arrival, Larson had also videotaped and shot still photos of the find and had taken the other members of the team to the cliff. These included Terry Wentz, the Institute's chief fossil preparator, and the two teens Matthew and Jason Larson.
During their weeks at the quarry, Matthew had found more than a dozen teeth apparently shed by T. rexes. Hendrickson hadn't found any, a fact which Matthew never let her forget. Responding to his good natured teasing, Hendrickson had said prophetically, "I'm not interested in finding single teeth. I'm looking for a complete skeleton." Now they would see just how complete the skeleton was.
Peter Larson walked Neal to the cliff, and said. "Gee, can you tell me what it is?" He was still playing the big brother.
"Well, it's big."
"Yeah."
"Is it T. rex.?" asked Neal, who had never seen such bones before.
Just like the dinosaur itself, the site of a find is of great scientific importance. It may contain fossilized plants or bones from other ancient creatures that provide a context for the dinosaur's life. Good paleontologists and fossil hunters don't just excavate a find, they harvest the soil around it as well.
Larson's crew began by picking up all the scraps from the ground and putting them in plastic bags which they carefully labeled. They then bagged much of the surrounding dirt for future screening. Next, they stabilized the bones sticking out from the cliff by covering them with canvas and plaster of Paris--a technique first described by the English geologist Sir Henry Thomas de la Beche in 1836.
This was easy compared to the next task: removing 29 feet of overburden. For five days the Larson brothers, Hendrickson, and Wentz worked with pick and shovel to clear the sandstone and hard soil above the skeleton. "These were the hottest days of the summer," says Hendrickson. "The temperature was 115 plus. You're trying to find shade, but there is none. And we don't stop at noon." The team dubbed the site, "Tyrable Mountain."
Once down to the level of the skeleton, the team used knives, brushes, and smaller tools to remove the bones. They used a mapping technique learned from Bakker, marking the location of each bone by tracing it full scale on butcher paper. They also documented the dig with still photos and videotape.
Maurice Williams can be seen on the tape. He visited three or four times times during the excavation. On one occasion, the crew took a break and helped him dehorn some cattle.
The Larsons quickly determined that Sue was large for a T. rex. Her 54 inch femur suggested that she would have stood 13 feet tall at the hip and 41 feet long, a foot taller and two to three feet longer than Barnum Brown's famous T. rex at the American Museum of Natural History. "At that size, running at 25 to 40 miles an hour, this was one big, terrible dinosaur," says Neal Larson.
Brown's lengthy excavation of the first Montana T. rex in the pre-truck era presented numerous logistical problems. Encased in plaster, the dinosaur's pelvis alone weighed 4000 pounds, far too much for a conventional horse drawn wagon. What to do? Brown built a wooden sledge and then hitched it to a team of four horses for the 125 mile journey to the closest railroad station.
Excavating Sue was not nearly as problematic or time-consuming. Because she was so complete and her bones were confined to such a small area (about 25 feet by 30 feet), the crew was able to dig her out in only 17 days.
Larson says he told Williams he would pay him for the fossil "early on" after the discovery. Sue's skull was found on day eight, August 22. Says Larson, "After we could see what was there, I told Maurice, ‘This is a really good specimen. I'll give you $5000 for it,' and he said, ‘Fine.' I wrote on the check what it was for."
The check was marked: "for theropod skeleton Sue/8-14-90-MW." Williams deposited the check the day after he received it.
By August 31, the crew, which had grown to six, had removed all of Sue's bones except for a big block containing the skull, pelvis, sacrum, several dorsal vertebrae, ribs, the right leg, some foot bones, and, they hoped, the right forelimb. With continuous undercutting and plastering, they had this block ready to be removed by 5 p.m. on September 1. Because a large rainstorm was heading their way, they decided not to wait overnight to pull the nine foot by seven foot, 9000 pound block from the ground and onto the trailer. Three hours later the trailer and three trucks carrying another five tons headed back to Hill City. There, Wentz would begin the task of readying Sue for study and display.
After spending the night in Hill City, Peter Larson and Susan Hendrickson climbed into their respective trucks and drove in tandem to Bozeman where they showed the Museum of the Rockies' Horner pictures of their find and discussed the fossil's future--a future that at the time looked quite rosy.
The couple's future was much bleaker. Although they still cared deeply for one another and had just collaborated on what appeared to be one of the greatest dinosaur finds in history, they remained committed to ending their romance. Twenty-four hours after reaching Bozeman, Hendrickson bid Larson good-bye and headed to visit her family in Seattle. She and Larson were sure they'd see each other again, but never in their wildest dreams did they imagine the bizarre chain of events that would soon bring them face to face and cause them each such pain.
Although she felt a deep kinship with her namesake, Sue, Hendrickson sought no remuneration for her efforts. The thrill of discovering the best T. rex ever was enough. And besides, Larson had said that he wanted to build a new museum in Hill City and make Sue its star attraction. No one had ever gotten rich finding a fossil, Hendrickson told herself, and no one was going to get rich because of this dinosaur.
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Copyright© W.H. Freeman and Company. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt can be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the Publisher.
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