A flat tire sends Sue Hendrickson up a cliff, and she finds a T. rex
The Black Hills Institute crew had spent the summer of 1990 hunting fossils near the Cheyenne River Indian Reservation outside Faith, South Dakota, with little to show for it. On August 12, a flat tire on the group's truck sent everyone back to camp for repairs except Sue Hendrickson, who used the delay to explore a nearby cliff the team hadn't checked. She spotted bone fragments at the base, looked up, and saw vertebrae and larger bones jutting from the rock face above her. It was a Tyrannosaurus rex, and an unusually complete one.
Sue became the anchor specimen of the Field Museum in Chicago and a fixture of American natural history, but the discovery also set off a legal fight over who owns fossils found on tribal trust land, a case that changed how museums negotiate fossil access with private and tribal landowners.
QHow many of a T. rex's roughly 360 bones did the team actually recover from the cliff?
About 250 of the roughly 360 bones known to make up a complete Tyrannosaurus rex skeleton were pulled from the site outside Faith. Counted by individual bone rather than overall bulk, that put Sue at 73 percent complete, a different but still record-setting measure alongside the more commonly cited 90 percent by bulk. Paleontologists typically had to fill most of a mounted skeleton with sculpted replacements; Sue needed relatively few. That completeness let researchers study details like healed bone injuries visible on the original material, evidence obscured in more fragmentary specimens.
QWhat triggered the courtroom fight over who actually owned the skeleton?
Maurice Williams, the rancher who owned the surface land, had accepted $5,000 from the Black Hills Institute for the fossil, but he later argued that payment covered something other than the outright sale of the specimen. Because his property was held in trust status connected to the Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe, ownership of anything extracted from it became a federal question rather than a simple private transaction. The dispute ended up in federal court, and the ruling stripped the Institute of the skeleton it had spent years excavating and preparing, handing title back to Williams.
QWho ended up bidding against each other to keep Sue on public display?
When Sotheby's auctioned the skeleton in October 1997, the winning bid came from the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago, which assembled financial backing from corporate sponsors including McDonald's and Disney to reach the $8.3 million sale price. That figure was the highest ever paid for a fossil at the time. The corporate sponsorship came with a condition: replica casts of Sue were produced and distributed, including sets sent to Disney's Animal Kingdom in Florida for public display and others placed into a traveling tour sponsored by McDonald's, extending the specimen's reach well beyond the museum floor in Chicago.
