Tyrannosaurus Sue: The Extraordinary Saga of the Largest, Most Fought over T-Rex Ever Found by Steve Fiffer

Author:Steve Fiffer [Fiffer, Steve]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780716794622
Amazon: 0716794624
Publisher: W. H. Freeman
Published: 2001-05-02T07:00:00+00:00

Jurassic Farce

“Four million dollars.”

Fred Nuss, a tan, wiry man in his forties leaned forward in his chair. The fossil hunter hadn’t come from his home in Otis, Kansas, to bid on the dinosaur. He already had a T. rex, although it wasn’t quite as complete as Sue.

Unlike Peter Larson, Nuss had decided to sell his dinosaur. He and his business partner Alan Detrich were asking $10 million for the specimen, which they called, “Z. rex” after a rancher named Zimmerscheid. Their dream was the academic community’s nightmare. The entrepreneurs didn’t care if the buyer was a museum or a private collector or if Z. ended up in the United States or abroad. Nuss had once sold a mosasaur skull to actor Charlie Sheen for $30,000.

John Tayman, a writer who covered the auction for Outside magazine, reported: “When each million-dollar threshold was reached, Nuss and his team let out a polite whoop and then sat back giggling while the hundreds of thousands flew by.”

While the institute lawyers constructed their appeal of Judge Battey’s decision, Peter Larson reconstructed the life of his other T. rex. Each of Stan’s scars told a story. “We surmise that [he] scuffled for territory, fought over food, and engaged in other behavior similar to today’s carnivores,” Larson wrote.

Stan’s “pathologies” included several broken and healed ribs and a scar the same size as a T. rex tooth. He also appeared to have suffered and survived a broken neck. In the process of healing, two vertebrae fused together and a third became immobilized by extra bone growth.

His cheeks also showed evidence of healed injuries.

Looking at Stan’s skull, Larson the paleontologist turned phrenologist. “Most chilling is a healed injury on the back of the braincase,” he wrote. “Through the back end of the skull we found a circular hole more than 1 inch in diameter—into which a T. rex tooth fits nicely. The hole ends at a spot where a large chunk of bone (2 inches by 5 inches) actually broke away. Amazingly, Stan lived through this incredible injury because a thin layer of bone sealed the broken surface.”

Stan Sacrison, the amateur who had found this T. rex, had also helped collect Z. rex. After spending months on their own looking for such a dinosaur without luck in 1992, Nuss and Detrich had driven to Buffalo, South Dakota, to see if Sacrison and his twin brother Steven might help them. Stan, an electrician by day, and Steven, a construction worker and part-time grave digger, had enjoyed great success digging for fossils. The twins, in their mid-thirties at the time, introduced Nuss and Detrich to Zimmerscheid, who had found bones on his land outside of town.

Like Sue Hendrickson, the brothers seemed to have been born with the ability to find fossils. The lanky, sandy-haired Stan was just 8 years old when he found his first dinosaur bone, the vertebra of a Triceratops. He has been hunting for dinosaurs ever since.

In 1987, Sacrison first spotted the bones of the T. rex that would eventually be named after him.

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