Instead of a boy named Billy, there is a T. Rex named Sue–so dubbed in honor of the intrepid excavating volunteer Susan Hendrickson, who first stumbled upon this magnificent specimen one hot August day in 1990. Sue is no run-of-the-mill 65-million-year-old, however. She is the Hope Diamond of dinosaurs, the 13th of her kind ever found as well as the largest and most complete, with at least 80% of her bones recovered. Just to gaze upon this beast’s intact 5-foot-long skull with its fearsome dagger-like teeth puts all the cinematic versions of such prehistoric creatures to shame.
If anyone is the Dustin Hoffman of this saga, it’s Peter Larson. Even as a child, this resident of tiny Hill City, SD, who is President and Co-Founder of the Black Hills Institute of Geological Research was driven to dig up Earth’s deepest past for future generations to study and ponder. True, he is a businessman who makes a living by selling these rare treasures, often to international buyers, but when Larson first spied three of Sue’s sun-baked vertebrae sticking through a mound of rubble, it was love at first sight.
For 17 days, his small team used picks and shovels in 115-degree heat to free Sue and haul her away for safekeeping at their facility. There, they painstakingly cleaned and restored her for two years, with plans to build a nonprofit natural history museum in Hill City where Sue would be the main attraction. Invaluable archival footage from this period captures such hold-your-breath moments as when workers gingerly separate Sue’s fragile head from her pelvis.
But the community’s dreams for Sue quickly crumbled in 1992, after a battalion of FBI agents and National Guard soldiers descended upon the institute. Claiming that the dinosaur was stolen from federal land, officials ordered that she and countless other fossils stored there be seized and carted away to a university in Rapid City that was 30 miles away. There they would sit until a 1995 trial would eventually determine their ultimate fate.
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