Vintage Chicago Tribune: Sue the T. rex's journey to the Field Museum

Chicago Tribune

15-05-2025

Our city — the one of 'Big Shoulders' — has always sought out the massive. Chicago has been home to the tallest building (when it was known as Sears Tower), the largest convention center (McCormick Place) in North America, and even one of the world's largest wastewater treatment plants (Stickney Water Reclamation Plant which, OK, is in Cicero, just outside the city limits).
The opportunity to increase the city's stature once again materialized in October 1997. That's when the largest, most complete Tyrannosaurus rex skeleton became available at an auction hosted by Sotheby's. But bringing the fossil lovingly named after its discoverer to Chicago wouldn't have been possible without the combination of Sue Hendrickson and a flat tire.
As the Field Museum celebrates 25 years since the debut of Sue, here's a look back at how the T. rex made its way from the Black Hills of South Dakota to Chicago.
The vehicle of a dinosaur-hunting crew planning to leave a site in western South Dakota at the end of an expedition was found to have a flat tire. While others went into town to make the repair, Sue Hendrickson, a member of that crew, decided to have a look in an area the expedition had not searched. It was a good choice.
While examining a cliff's side, she discovered a Tyrannosaurus rex specimen — the largest, most complete and best preserved T. rex found to that date.
The dinosaur skeleton — which was estimated to be 90% complete — became known as Sue not because of its sex (undetermined) but after its finder.
Peter Larson, whose Black Hills Institute of Geological Research Inc., excavated the tyrannosaur, paid Maurice Williams, a member of the Cheyenne River Sioux tribe on whose land the fossil was found, $5,000.
The fossil was seized by federal authorities who claimed it was illegally removed from Williams' ranch, which was held in trust by the government. The Black Hills Institute was charged with violation of the U.S. Antiquities Act, theft of U.S. governmental property and theft of Native American tribal property.
Long before Sue's discovery, Peter Larson and his brother Neal had built Black Hills Institute on a reputation for highly skilled fossil preparations and exhibit mountings, selling them to a variety of private collectors and public museums, including the Field Museum.
When Hendrickson found Sue on Williams' land, the Larson brothers thought the extraordinary fossil would make a dream come true. They were going to build a nonprofit museum in Hill City, their hometown, drawing tourists from nearby Mount Rushmore.
Instead, the legal battles Sue sparked nearly bankrupted them.
The U.S. attorney's office in South Dakota, setting out to prove that the Larsons had illegally taken Sue and other fossils from federal lands, spent years and millions of dollars investigating the institute, raiding the company and carting off fossils and business records on several occasions.
In the resulting six-week trial, however, out of 146 felony charges, the jury convicted Peter Larson on two charges of failing to declare several thousand dollars he had carried with him on two business trips outside the U.S.
The 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that Sue's fossil bones technically were a constituent of the soil, part of the land, and belonged to the landowner, Williams. The Supreme Court let that decision stand.
Peter Larson, whose success as a private fossil-hunter had raised the hackles of many academic paleontologists, was sent to prison on federal charges that many South Dakotans came to regard as an abuse of prosecutorial power
'I wouldn't wish that on my worst enemy,' Larson later told the Tribune. 'This was so hard on my wife, worse for her than for me. On every visiting day she traveled hundreds of miles and was there for me. But the whole ordeal drained her, and when I got out (on Dec. 8, 1998), she decided she didn't want to be married anymore. That was the hardest thing, to lose her.'
A judge awarded ownership of Sue to Williams, and the government, acting as his trustee, decided the best way to serve his interests was to auction the skeleton.
The bidding for Sue started at $500,000 and rose by $100,000 increments, quickly breaking into the millions as bidders on the floor and on phones competed for what auctioneer Redden called 'a world treasure.'
The crowd in the sales room gasped as the bidding broke through $5 million and kept climbing.
At the $7 million mark, most of the would-be buyers dropped out and tension mounted in the room as the time between bids lengthened. Finally, after several warnings, auctioneer David Redden knocked Sue down at $7.6 million — for a total of $8.36 million.
The auction took little more than eight minutes.
In the end, bidding came down to the Field Museum, the J.I. Kislack Foundation of Miami, the North Carolina State Museum of Natural Sciences, and the Dallas Museum of Natural History. Redden said a private buyer was also in the final bidding but refused to identify him.
Later, McCarter said he was never confident that Field would come away the winner.
'I was very nervous' as the bidding progressed, he said.
He declined to reveal how high the museum had been willing to go to buy Sue.
At the time, it was the highest price paid for a fossil (until a stegosaurus nicknamed 'Apex' grabbed that title in 2024). Williams received $7.6 million of the money the museum paid for Sue.
But Williams never planned to visit the fossil that once was buried on his land.
'Everybody is knowledgeable about the amount of money (Sue) brought into our family,' Williams, father of four grown children, said in a 2000 telephone interview with the Tribune. 'What we got out of the thing, we're handling it pretty well. Some of the children have used it for education and whatever.
'People here don't talk anymore about that thing.'
The Black Hills Institute claimed it had a trademark on the name Sue and that the name couldn't be used without permission.
'The trademark we have on Sue is exactly the same as … Mickey Mouse,' said Marion Zenker, marketing coordinator for the private fossil-hunting institute. 'Walt Disney didn't own the mouse, but he still owned the name.'
On April 15, 1998, the dinosaur formerly known as Sue then became formally be known as Sue. The news came as a disappointment to the thousands of kids who entered a contest to give the dinosaur a new name after legal disputes over licensing of the name Sue erupted. But museum officials conceded that lawyers advised that the contest-winning name — 'Dakota' — had the potential to cause legal problems as well, given that it was already used for several products.
Hendrickson — who did not have a high school diploma — received her first university credentials in the form of an honorary doctorate of humane letters from the University of Illinois Chicago.
The professional fossil hunter and self-taught archaeologist and paleontologist with a namesake T. rex at the Field Museum came to paleontology by way of an early career diving for sunken treasure and collecting fish specimens in the Caribbean. She was a voracious reader as a child in Munster, and decided against a formal university education after talking things over with the head of marine biology at the University of Washington.
Hendrickson had always been a hard worker, her mother said, and hoped that her success and the recognition she received serves as inspiration for other people who pursue their ambitions without the benefit of a college degree.
Sue — whose chocolate-brown skeleton took 12 people 30,000 hours to remove from rock — debuted in Stanley Field Hall (the lobby inside the Field Museum).
'Sue has a number of features never before observed in the other T. rex skeletons,' Tribune reporter William Mullen wrote. 'The new information underscores what scientists for the last several years have been postulating: that dinosaurs are closely related to birds.'
'Evolving Planet' opened, thanks to a donation by Ken Griffin, founder and CEO of Citadel. The $17 million permanent exhibit used video, interactive displays, paintings and lots and lots of fossils to chronicle the evolution of life on Earth over 4 billion years.
Sue's new smaller but much more dramatic digs on the museum's second floor opened.
The new home also incorporated changes in the presentation of the skeleton — including a much fuller chest thanks to the mounting of formerly separated gastralia, or 'belly ribs' — which were all carefully detailed on accompanying labels that help tell a bigger story.
'We wanted to use Sue as a vehicle to inform the public that science is never done,' said museum CEO Richard Lariviere. 'You're always understanding.'
Thanks for reading!
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