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Hot rocks

Black markets and blue scientists: inside the underground trade in fossils
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Text and Photos By Leslie Anthony

The wall mural in the bar of the hotel in Patricia, Alberta, says it all. Kitty-corner to a raucous birthday celebration and a cue-ball's hop from a pool table where ranch hands are getting drunk, the floor-to-ceiling rendering is an amateur but endearing attempt to reconcile the natural and commercial histories of the province. In earthen tones, cowboys herd cattle across a range studded with oil wells while groups of bison are chased by First Nation hunters on horseback. There are combines and trains and mines and antelope-pretty much what you'd expect in a simple ode to the area. But wait: what's this in the corner?

Almost cartoonish in its snarling countenance, a toothy Albertosaurus - slightly detuned cousin to the ever-popular Tyrannosaurus Rex - takes in the scene. To a casual observer, the dinosaur most obviously conjures the province's deep geological and natural heritage; something both studied by scientists and enjoyed by the public. And though this was almost certainly the artist's intent, irony exists in the graphic juxtaposition: in some circles - and very much so in Alberta - fossil remains are also viewed as commercial substances. Like other natural resources depicted here, the extraction and sale of fossils represents sustainable business and, in some cases, very big money.

These two views of the mineralized remains of extinct organisms - public trust versus private enterprise - underlie a long-simmering debate that often sees heated clashes between governments, individuals, and scientists over access to important fossils. Patricia was the penultimate stop on a winding tour one recent summer through the fossil-rich southern tier of Alberta with cohort Dr. Michael Caldwell, a professor of vertebrate palaeontology at the University of Alberta in Edmonton. Together, we'd set out to plumb the extent of conflict in the increasingly popular business of mining ancient life.

Our mutual interest in the problem was established years before near Joggins, Nova Scotia, one of the world's most revered paleontological deposits and now a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Highlighting the convoluted and often emotional milieu surrounding fossil rights, here we'd witnessed a confrontation between eminent paleontologist Robert Carroll of McGill University's Redpath Museum and a group of local fossil entrepreneurs. Collecting under permit from the Nova Scotia Museum, Carroll was searching for remains of Hylonomus lyelli - the earliest known reptile - typically found encased in fossil stumps embedded in the dramatic red-sandstone cliffs lining the shore. The locals, who'd been leading "stump" tours and operating a small museum nearby, reacted by harassing Carroll, accusing him of vandalism, calling in print and TV media, and eventually persuading the province to rescind his permits.

For Caldwell, a seasoned field paleontologist used to working in unpopulated areas in the Arctic and British Columbia, it was a rude awakening; for myself, an eye-opening introduction to the often supercharged milieu of modern fossil-hunting, a world in which a single T. rex tooth might fetch $20,000 U.S. on the open market. The situation raised serious questions about control of fossil deposits located on public land: should access be restricted only to scientists so that any information gleaned is read into the public trust? Or should local interests also be able to benefit based on the argument that the fossils are a community resource? And what happens when fossils are found on private land?

It doesn't help that fossil-hunting has been romanticized in popular media; dino-mania has driven suburban paleo-hounds into the countryside in search of their own motherlodes. While picking up the occasional common trilobite or shark tooth isn't a problem, hoarding the skeleton of a potentially undescribed reptile might be.

Uninformed amateurs, however, represent but a tiny fraction of the problem. With big money at stake, current laws and regulations pose little deterrent to trespassers, smugglers and poachers. Ultimately, it all boils down to one question: whose fossils are they, anyway?

 

DEEP HISTORY

On a scalding day in August, Caldwell and I meet up in Calgary. Plotting a rough course through the main signposts of Alberta's fossil industry we find ourselves unsure where to start. On a whim, Caldwell grabs the Yellow Pages and thumbs to "fossils." We find a listing for Canada Fossils, scribble the address and hit the trail.

Located on the southern outskirts of Cowtown in a non-descript warehouse, Canada Fossils is familiar to most institutional paleontologists. With activities ranging from the mining of fossil gemstone to contractual extraction and assembly of dinosaur skeletons for some of the world's leading museums, the company's history provides the perfect launch pad for our fact-finding mission. Although it once tussled with regulatory bodies, Canada Fossils now enjoys a reputation as one of the most professional and lawful of North America's commercial fossil enterprises.

We walk in off the street and meet Pierre Paré, president of Korite Minerals Ltd., the original company set up to mine ammolite - a prismatic and opalesque gemstone produced by millions of years of pressure on the mother-of-pearl produced by ancient marine ammonites, long-extinct cousins to the modern nautilus. With a big smile, Paré tours us through the facilities.

We pass various rooms where workers cut, polish, and mount ammolite. In the warehouse, stacked floor-to-ceiling with large, Grade-A Alberta ammonites dangling conspicuous tags, Paré recounts how, amid great debate, the Alberta government in 1978 had passed the Historical Resources Act (HRA; see sidebar "Rock, Paper, Scissors"). The sweeping act deemed all fossils public property regardless of where they're found. The tags, Paré explains, are part of a provincial inventory used to keep track of what's pulled from the ground: Korite photo-documents each ammonite and submits the material to the Royal Tyrrell Museum in Drumheller for screening. The museum requests a look at anything spectacular or out of the ordinary, then discharges the rest to the company. The ammonites - mostly Placenticerous meeki from the 70 million-year-old Upper Cretaceous marine deposit known as the Bearpaw Formation - are then sorted into gemstone or art-piece quality. Since most gemstone comes from flattened or crushed specimens with almost zero scientific value, and because yield per weight of mined material is minute, the system was initially viewed by companies like Korite/Canada Fossils as a cumbersome hurdle in an already convoluted process. But the chill seems to have thawed.

"We don't have a problem with (the HRA) now," Paré says.

In fact, Canada Fossils works closely with the scientific community, as demonstrated by a recent project in Montana. For years the Blackfoot Nation allowed famed U.S. paleontologist Jack Horner to work on reservation land. When Canada Fossils offered the Blackfoot a cash deal for access - something academicians couldn't - and to train their people to scout and extract material for pay, Horner was understandably unhappy. So Canada Fossils proposed a unique symbiosis; they offered to keep one of Horner's students on-site and let Horner have first pick of all materials. Still, Canada Fossils operates in the U.S. because of the money to be made in the dinosaur market, and because legislation such as the HRA means they cannot make the same kind of deals in Canada.

The dinosaur skeletons they extract-from Montana and elsewhere-are sold mostly to museums and institutions and put together utilizing only clamps so the skeletons can be disassembled and studied piece by piece by scientists. But this downstream end of the commercial business seems almost too tidy. Our Joggins experience suggests that any lingering rough spots in the chain of commerce will be found where the fossils are leaving the ground. Half an hour later we're driving south through waves of sweetgrass towards the source of Korite's fortune: the Bearpaw.

 

DOWN BY THE RIVER

Rene Trudel is a slight, energetic man with a penchant for cigarettes and an addiction to skiing. As Field Manager for Korite, Trudel supervises mining operations in the St. Mary's River valley; this includes chasing ammonite poachers from the far reaches of Korite's leasehold.

Trudel is also Korite's main buyer, travelling to nearby towns to purchase ammonites from First Nations collectors who acquire the material on reserve land. Though his transactions generally go smoothly, he's aware that economic opportunism afforded by the bullish ammonite market ($40 to $2,000 per natural stone and sold at a substantial mark-up) has led to increasing violence in this part of Alberta. Trudel once witnessed a man hit another square in the face with a geologist's hammer in a dispute over an ammonite; another character has been known to beat up kids, take their ammonites, then sell them himself. Trudel shuns those involved in such tactics, but the writing is on the wall: tales of gun-toting whites hijacking fossils from native land, tires being shot out, and bullet-hole warnings in trespassers' trucks abound in the tight-knit fossil community. Tyrrell curator Andy Neuman doesn't mince words about the ammonite scene.

"I'm a government employee and not really allowed to have an opinion," he states flatly, "but I wouldn't go down to the St. Mary's River without a flak jacket."

After touring Korite's open-pit ammonite mine, we retire to Trudel's house to quench throats that are desert-parched after only a few hours in the blistering sun. Passionate and talkative, Trudel spins tales of fossil collecting in the world's hinterlands until the beer is exhausted and dusk sucks up the heat like a door ajar in winter. Each anecdote is fondly rendered, but he positively ignites when talk turns to the Devonian deposits of Miguasha on Québec's Gaspé Peninsula, where he'd once spent several months. Maybe it's the beer or just the headiness of his experience, but Trudel's recollection of his first encounter with the lobe-finned fish Eusthenopteron foordi -de facto poster boy for the water-land transition in possessing both gills and lungs-is particularly compelling. After weeks of fruitless, backbreaking work, he'd been on hands and knees wrestling a nodule from the deposit's face when the rock suddenly cracked open and put him eye-to-eye with the three-dimensional, open-mouthed head of the fabled fish.

"Now dat, dat was reeelly sometin'," he chuckles, shaking his head and stabbing the dark with a cigarette, its ember throwing just enough light to catch the sparkle in his eye.

In that instant I see that whatever else Trudel might be - merchant, miner, mercenary - he's mostly a guy who has glimpsed his own soul staring back through the gaping jaws of a 370 million-year-old fish. This notion of connection offers the clearest explanation for the lure - and monetary value - of fossils to humans.

Like many commercial collectors, Trudel largely sees his role as serving science. "When we find something really good, (the pros) are always the first guys we call," he says.

The question of when fossils become mere objects is one that divides the commercial contingent; some prefer to have everything screened by scientists, others like to make the call themselves, and still others draw no such distinction. And that - like any other garden of irresponsibility - is where trouble eventually takes seed. Consider the legion of apocryphal tales such as this from South Dakota's Black Hills: a spectacular mososaur find a decade ago by the South Dakota School of Mines languished in the ground because of a lack of money to pay for removal and preparation; the specimen was eventually extracted by the profit-driven Black Hills Institute for whom the incentive was clear - the mososaur ended up as the wall of a Japanese billionaire's swimming pool without ever having been studied by scientists (see sidebar: "A Rex Named Sue").

Hans Deiter-Sues, a curator of vertebrate palaeontology at Toronto's Royal Ontario Museum, acknowledges the problems posed by rabid commercial collecting and underground traffic, but also sees the vocation as a double-edged sword.

"Far from condemning commercial collecting like a lot of my colleagues, I like to point out that many of the great fossil collections in European and North American museums started with commercial collections."

This is echoed by the commercial lobby, who could clearly help to bring in the hundreds of fossils uncovered by erosion every year in America's western deserts - largely on the public land from which they're barred - fossils that will crumble to dust or be covered again unless excavated. It's a powerful argument whose logic is inevitably derailed by the thorny issues of access and ownership.

 

ROCK OMELETTE

Heading south the next day, Warner appears on the horizon as a fleet of grain elevators sailing across the prairie. Backed by the distant silhouettes of the Sweet Grass Hills astride the Montana border, a hand-painted sign points to the "Dinosaur Egg" interpretive centre, a small building on the outer edge of town. Here, visitors view fossils, buy cheesy souvenirs and watch technicians chip at plaster-encased dinosaur nests and map the exact locations of remains. We sign up for a tour of the nest site, 15 minutes to the west.

The nests lie in Devil's Coulée, a weathered ranchland wash, where they were discovered in 1987 by Wendy Sloboda, a Warner high school student with an interest in fossils who was scouting on behalf of the Tyrrell. Immediately recognizing the site's importance, the Tyrrell called in Alberta's Ministry of Culture to make a deal with the landowner. With a mixture of stubbornness and delusions of commercial grandeur, the rancher balked. So important were these fossils, however, that the Tyrrell went so far as to have Right to Access legislation signed by the minister and ready to slap down if the rancher didn't give in (the only time this has ever been done). But the decree was never pronounced; after three weeks of negotiation, the landowner relented, accepting a deal that gave him more land elsewhere, the right to lease-farm on the original plot surrounding Devil's Coulée, plus a cool $400,000. It may seem the rancher made out like a bandit, but the deal was a winner on both sides. World-renowned already, the site drew more international attention when a record-size nest of 12 eggs was discovered while excavating a single egg for a Japanese television crew. And the lion's share of the media spotlight fell squarely, and deservedly, on the Royal Tyrrell and its globe-leading efforts.

With this site and its locally run interpretive facility, the Tyrrell is conducting an experiment in balancing community and provincial interests. Farmer Ed Sloboda, Wendy's father and tour guide during our visit, is a provincial "Paleo Trustee," a volunteer designation held by a few knowledgeable people who conduct frontline assessment of finds and alert the Tyrrell if they're significant. Wendy, on the other hand, is salaried with the Tyrrell and covers a large territory of southern Alberta, providing the official tie to the museum for this satellite venture. This allows the facility to charge for tours in order to cover operating costs; without the museum link to satisfy HRA provisions, it could not be self-supporting.

Our group scrambles down the eroded wash, kids stooping to examine any nugget that shows promise. Despite their scientific value, these egg clutches aren't the neat and tidy bird's-nest-in-the-ground affairs found in the Mongolian desert and popularized in dinosaur books. At Devil's Coulée, no untrained person could identify the jumbled rock bits and eroded rubble as nest components. Although eggshell fragments abound, they're little more than dark, largish sand grains embedded in a clay-like rock matrix.

Ed stops, bends to one knee, then, like a surrogate father travelling through time, gingerly brushes off a batch of eggs they've been uncovering in an upper strata. It's a Certatopsian nest, the first non-Hadrosaur find at the site. The tourists stare and snap photos, while the same sun that bathed these nests 100 million years ago - and would have hatched these very eggs had they not been flooded with sediment - reddens our necks. There's something comfortably diminufying about this thought, and I savour a momentary epiphany that puts it into perspective. In these eggs I see a direct line to my own puny existence; I feel both intimately connected to these fossils and that somehow they belong to me. I snap back to the present as Ed explains how there's no money for security to ward off the inevitable vandals at such an unprotected site. Taking in the 360-degrees of wheat waving on every horizon, encircling this precious portal to a vanishingly distant past, the thought of someone illegally hacking out a nest and ferreting it away - or even recklessly driving an ATV through the coulee - moves me almost to tears.

 

THE BIG EMPTY

Drawing a final bead on the Red River valley southeast of Drumheller, we drive several hours to Dinosaur Provincial Park, the jewel in Alberta's fossil crown. Like Joggins, DPP is a UNESCO World Heritage Site and one of the planet's richest sources of dinosaur remains: more than 400 specimens of almost 50 species have been found here, representing almost every group known from the late Cretaceous, some 75 million years ago.

As children, dinosaurs impress us simply for being super-sized and cool-looking. And while the biologically minded soon find their fascination with this ancient machinery turning to its legacy of from and function, for the rest of us dinosaurs morph from heavily distorted caricatures of the nature we know to vanguards of the nature we will never know - touchstones to an unfathomable dimension of Earth's history. Lost in the sleepy folds of deep time, dinosaurs remain the friendly monsters under evolution's bed (remember Barney ?), forever loveable in the mind's eye - albeit due mostly to the immunity extinction brings. As such, DPP is a theme park of history, design, and, importantly, imagination.

It's also a place that brings the vulnerability of Alberta's fossil resources into sharp focus. Sitting on the rim of the heavily eroded badlands that fall from the prairie, we watch mesmerized as the vast, phantasmagorical landscape changes colour with every passing cloud. The multi-hued rock strata, eroded buttes and twisted coulées etched by a constantly shifting rivercourse scream of the past. Enticed from our perch to the bottom of these canyonlands and the park gates, however, we find an RV and mini-bus parade that scream tourist.

Indeed, annual visitations to DPP have soared by a factor of five in the past decade to almost 200,000. Interest in dinosaurs stirred by Hollywood has resulted in a measurable worldwide effect on visitors to museums and places like DPP. At first blush this sounds wholly beneficial, but there's a dark side: increased public interest has also led to more fossil poaching and a flourishing black market in dino-bits. During the mid-nineties, in - appropriately enough - Horse Thief Canyon near Drumheller, an Albertosaurus skeleton plaster-capped by a permit-holder and headed for the Tyrrell was vandalized twice, and in both instances teeth were yanked from the jaw.

"We sent a crew out to extract it after the first incident," recalls Andy Neuman, "but it was vandalized again before we finished. The RCMP couldn't do anything unless the person was caught in the act."

Catching fossil poachers anywhere is an act of supreme luck, but especially so in a vast and convoluted wilderness like the Alberta badlands. In DPP, for instance, an area of 81 km 2 , a handful of rangers are responsible for everything from first aid to liquor-law enforcement. According to ranger Brian Bennet, who gives us a quick sunset tour, one ranger should be policing the paved tourist loop with four to five others canoeing and horseback riding the far reaches of the park.

"The current loss of information from resources is probably marginal, but the potential for illegal activity to explode is huge," he says. "One more dinosaur movie and this whole thing could blow wide open."

Everyone who visits DPP wants to take a piece of the place home, and the temptation to pick something up is huge, as we discover on our tour. As golden light spills through a canyon of Dr. Seuss-like rock towers, we crunch over a virtual carpet of fossil material; in one spot every second rock is a knuckle, toe, or tibial fragment. Because there's little deterrent to pocketing a small momento - violators usually receive no more than a warning - it's a definite problem.

"This place is an open-pit gold mine to people in the know," says Bennet (see sidebar "Law & Order: Criminal Intent").

There's also a catch between what the HRA is intended to preserve and what private landowners can do in exercising their rights. Collectors can take surface material around the park's perimeter with the permission of landowners, but it's impossible to regulate what is and isn't surface material.

"The difference between surface collection and excavation is huge in reality but blurred in practice," says Bennet, who feels landowners have little to gain from cooperating with authorities and little to lose by not doing so. "This is poor farm country. If someone offers (a farmer) $1,000 to look the other way while they haul bones out then what do you think the farmer is going to do?"

As with wildlife poaching, the lack of policing outside of heritage sites, parks and reserves can be traced to a lack of manpower, funding and direction from within.

Caldwell and I mull over our experiences of the past few days under the watchful stare of the Albertosaurus mural in the Patricia Hotel. In my mind's eye I see the make-believe creature surrounded by humans with pick-axes and fistfuls of money, arguing over who gets what. It's not a comforting thought. Like any business juggling regulations with private and public interests, the fossil world has its good, its bad, and its truly ugly. But it also has the trivial, which hints at where some of the commercial lines might be drawn. I recall our last stop on the way out of Drumheller. Steve and Sharon Wolchina run a fossil stand out of a truck at Horseshoe Canyon, a beautiful chunk of fossil-rich badland several kilometres up the highway. There, Steve had greeted us warmly, posed for pictures while tourists pawed his wares, and, as we left, handed Caldwell a cross-sectioned wafer of polished dinosaur bone with a smile.

"A gift for the scientific community," he chuckled, knowing Caldwell was far more likely to use the decorative thin-section as a beer coaster. There was no hint of what kind of animal it was or where it came from. And though it was likely that no important knowledge would be lost under the dripping glass of Caldwell's beer, there was one nagging thought: there may be information contained in the bone section that we've yet to devise a way of extracting.

But something Andy Neuman had said made me abandon the thought. "My hope is that we catch the serious offenders and that no important things leave the public trust," he said. "The rest-the bits and pieces and garage sales-I just don't want to know about them."

 

ROCK, PAPER, SCISSORS

If there's one thing commercial collectors, scientists, and enforcement officials can happily unite against, it's the patchwork of laws - and their variable interpretations - protecting fossils.

At the federal level in Canada, paleontological resources are formally protected only in national parks; Crown land resources are variously adjudicated by the provinces, and most deposits on private land have no protection at all. In the U.S., fossils on public lands belong to the American people and are the responsibility of a federal agency; state governments are generally wary of messing with anything that smacks of expropriating resources on private land. In Europe, with its dense population and history of human habitation, there's virtually no public land; most important fossil deposits are in the hands of longstanding landowners whom scientific institutions have dealt with directly for centuries.

This litany make Alberta's Historical Resources Act (HRA) stand out as a landmark document. The HRA holds that all fossil material - whether on public or private land - belongs to the public trust. Excavation other than by a government agency is conducted under permit. Permits are issued to commercial collectors only for ammonite shell, oysters, petrified wood, and plant impressions. Thus, fossil rights for private property may be acquired from the government and - as with mineral rights - the landowner is paid only a nuisance fee by the agent acquiring those rights.

Commercial collection of vertebrate fossils in Alberta is strictly forbidden, though scientists representing public collections lodged at museums or academic institutions may excavate and study such remains under permit from the Royal Tyrrell Museum. Only surface-collected vertebrate fossils from private land may be retained under a unique home-custodianship program; the material must be photographed and registered with the Tyrrell but cannot be sold or removed from the province.

Many provinces don't even recognize paleontological resources. Nova Scotia's Special Places Protection law does address the issue, but surprisingly full protection is given only in those private or public places that have previously been so designated. In the mid-nineties, Saskatchewan enacted legislation based on the Alberta model.

As solid as Alberta's legislation sounds, however, it isn't without problems: while it's acceptable to make trinkets and jewelry from common fossils of questionable scientific value, it's a crack in the dam of protection for other material.

"There's a movement afoot to add dinosaur bone to this list," says Andy Neuman of the Royal Tyrrell, "and you can only imagine what would happen there - you'd have machine-gun towers up all over the place to keep people from smashing skeletons into bits of bone that were legal to make into jewelry."

And because excavation requires exemption from policy, it is not treated like any other resource; this has created a third type of prerogative in addition to traditional surface and mineral rights. Landowners are understandably upset when, after claiming mineral and surface rights, someone knocks on their door and says, "Hi, I just won the ammonite rights to your land. How much do you want for a nuisance fee?" The situation is ripe for a legal challenge.

Court challenges also loom from riverbank ammonite collectors over the "Crown Land" definition of the high water mark, above which collecting is illegal. Alberta collectors believe they should be allowed to gather material as far away from the water as full flood stage could take them, although the province disagrees. Waterlines are also a problem facing governments whose jurisdiction includes ocean shorelines. Here the conflict is property laws versus laws of the sea (it's federal jurisdiction up to the high tide line), so provincial efforts to regulate collecting come face to face with the public's right to seashores.

 

LAW & ORDER: CRIMINAL INTENT

In the summer of 1998, John Parsons' fossil store in Drumheller, Alberta, was like many across the continent. Inside were plenty of European molluscs and the usual assortment of polished nautiloids, trilobites and shark teeth. There were fish from Wyoming, British Columbia and Brazil. The store's centrepiece was a pair of fully articulated Romanian Cave Bears.

Although patrons were typically ignorant of the facts behind the fossils, those in the know could quickly identify items of questionable origin and status: a highly illegal Reticulated Python skin, a clear violation of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species that could bring a heavy fine and jail time; and three Chinese dinosaur eggs - legal to own but illegal to remove from China and therefore smuggled. There were fragments of French and Argentine dinosaur eggs and tons of local Hadrosaur bone - some displaying important paleo-ecological information such as bite marks, and much of it questionably "surface-collected" (the bone wasn't properly discoloured by oxidation as surface material typically is). Given the loose practices of most small-time collectors, however, such transparent illegalities were unremarkable save for one thing: Parsons had supposedly learned his lesson - at the time he was the only person ever successfully prosecuted under Alberta's Historical Resources Act.

In December 1987, Parsons pleaded guilty to altering and damaging a paleontological resource without a permit, and was fined $2,500. According to a report by Dinosaur Provincial Park Ranger Roger Benoit, Parsons and another person were found "using a trike in the park and were picking dinosaur fossils... (Parsons) admitted he had picked fossil material on both sides of the river... I seized one box of various type fossil material from his trike and van."

Although Benoit called in the RCMP, Parsons was originally convicted in a Drumheller court under the Parks Act only for unauthorized use of a motorized vehicle in the park. A charge was also filed under the HRA for excavation without a permit but dropped for lack of evidence. Crown prosecutor Darwin Greaves reviewed the conviction and found the case was handled too loosely, arranging for Tyrrell officials to appraise the material. Although the fossil had a small commercial value of $1,400, its scientific value was high because it included the lower jaw of an alligator, a fossil previously unknown to the park.

Parsons refused me an interview, but fellow commercial collectors, who clearly wished to distance themselves from the public image created by the Parsons case, were willing to go on the record. Although the private fossil-collecting community around Drumheller is a tight-knit group, Sharon Wolchina was blunt.

"Parsons has made a lot of mistakes," she said. "He was on a river trip with my husband Steve for four days and didn't tell him about having recently been nabbed for illegal collecting in Dinosaur Provincial Park. He never mentioned there were charges pending. On that trip he tried to get Steve to collect in the park with him and Steve refused. When Steve found out about the charges he was furious; first because they were friends, and second because John had tried to drag him into the park even after the charges."

 

A REX NAMED SUE

North America's most celebrated case of fossil intrigue came to a bizarre and expensive end in October 1997, when Chicago's Field Museum-backed by a consortium of deep-pocketed supporters - dropped $7.6 million usd on a female Tyrannosaurus rex that had been seized and held by the U.S. government, then put up for auction. Dubbed "Sue" by the media, the specimen was, at the time, the largest and most complete of the dozen or so T. rex skeletons unearthed this century, and therefore the most scientifically important.

Sue began her strange life-after-death journey on a ranch in South Dakota's Black Hills. Discovered in 1990 by a team from The Black Hills Institute - a commercial enterprise trading in local dinosaur fossils - the skeleton was extracted and stored in their warehouse in Hill City. The rancher, however, was a status Sioux, and the land - owned by the Sioux Nation - had been temporarily deeded to the government, bringing Sue's eventual disposition under the aegis of U.S. federal caretaking regulations. Although BHI hadn't obtained proper permits to extract Sue, it likely would have gotten away with it if a 1992 FBI investigation of illegal exportation of fossil materials and money hadn't unearthed the fact. The unprepared skeleton was seized along with other fossils and a mountain of incriminating paperwork.

After languishing in storage for years, Sue was appraised and put on the auction block at Sotheby's - furthering the contentious notion of fossils as commodities and art pieces. The notoriety and salability of a genuine T. rex skeleton (most on display in the world's institutions are plaster casts) set the stage for anticipated private interests to go head-to-head with a number of corporate-backed academic partnerships. The auction was a raucous affair that featured bidders on cell phones to mysterious backers, variously rumoured to include Japanese billionaires and Michael Jackson. In a bidding war that started at under $2 million, a consortium led by the Field Museum, that included significant help from Ronald McDonald and the California State University system, prevailed.

The scientific community breathed a huge sigh of relief and Sue found the perfect home; one where she could be studied by both academics and the always-interested public.

 

 



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