T-Rex Sue Unearthed: Most Complete Dinosaur Found

Sue Hendrickson was exploring sandstone cliffs near Faith, South Dakota, on August 12, 1990, while the rest of her fossil-hunting team drove into town to fix a flat tire. She noticed bone fragments at the base of a cliff, looked up, and saw large bones protruding from the rock face. The skeleton she had stumbled upon would turn out to be the largest, most complete Tyrannosaurus rex ever found, containing roughly 250 bones representing about 90 percent of the animal's frame. The discovery electrified paleontology. Previous T. rex finds were typically fragmentary, often missing more than half their bones. This specimen, quickly named "Sue" after its discoverer, had been remarkably well preserved. Scientists believe the dinosaur died near a riverbed about 67 million years ago and was rapidly buried by sediment, protecting the bones from scavengers and weathering. The skull alone measured five feet long, with most teeth still intact. What followed was one of the most contentious legal battles in the history of fossil collecting. Maurice Williams, the Sioux rancher on whose land the skeleton was found, had been paid $5,000 by the Black Hills Institute for the right to excavate. The FBI and National Guard seized the bones in 1992, and a federal court ultimately ruled that Sue belonged to Williams because the land was held in trust by the federal government. Williams sold the skeleton at Sotheby's auction in 1997. The Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago, backed by funding from McDonald's and Disney, won the bidding at $8.36 million, the highest price ever paid for a fossil. Sue went on permanent display in 2000, where the skeleton has drawn millions of visitors. The legal saga also prompted lasting changes in fossil collection laws, particularly on federal and tribal lands, forcing amateur and professional paleontologists alike to navigate a thicket of ownership regulations that barely existed before Sue was pulled from the South Dakota earth.