back to south dakota by the end of the year to cover the story and see what was going to happen to it. america s indian tribes have fought the white man over many different issues through the years, but the newest fight is over a dinosaur. it was a big story and a very unusual story. come in and seize sue, everything exploded. controversy tonight. controversy surrounding the institute and their most famous discovery. it may be the custody battle of the century. scientists, indians, the u.s. government. you find any fossils, the government may take them away. not only has he taken this dinosaur away, but he s taken our research away too, every photograph, every record we had about this dinosaur and the locality where she was found. sue was seized pursuant to a search warrant, but there was never a crime charged. pat and i talked about filing suit. you know, we sued the federal government for return of our property. the black hills institute
building, doing preparation. 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 flabbergasted 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
since sue was seized by federal agents in 1992, the fossil has been stored at the school of mines. my first contact with mr. morris williams is 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. everybody wanted it. i called up morris and i said, i can come out to south dakota if you want and i ll visit with you. and he said, great, and actually visited the boxes in which sue
he s really our best preparator. pete let me work on part of the skull in the field, which was amazing. he s working and uncovering the teeth one by one by one. it was spectacular. teeth like this just sticking right out of the skull. we re going, oh my god. look at this thing. look how huge it is. this has gotta be bigger than the one at the american museum. it s huge. it s wonderful. we had started a long time ago naming particular dinosaurs, and the name sue, for susan hendrickson, goes down in history, and i think that s a kind of a cool way to reward those amateurs who make these discoveries.
if she wasn t going to be in black hills where she morally should be, field museum was a good place. this was just the kind of place that we felt sue had to go to. my reaction was relief that that specimen wound up where the public and scientific community will have access to it. i think it s probably the second best place she could have been. it s going to go where millions of people would see her. she s not going to be in prison anymore. sue is free. and people can see her and they can get the same excitement that i have for her, and they can love her just like i do. to me, the dinosaur still belongs in hill city. pete s the kind of guy who can go out and find half a dozen