If you’ve ever been to the Field Museum in Chicago, you’ve met “Sue.” She’s 42 feet long, weighs nearly 4,000 pounds, and is the largest, most complete Tyrannosaurus rex skeleton ever found. She was also the subject of one of the craziest legal battles over a dinosaur ever.
That legal struggle is chronicled in meticulous (and heartbreaking) detail in the documentary Dinosaur 13, which will air on CNN this week. But before the battle, there were just the bones, which were found by Peter Larson and his team at the Black Hills Institute in South Dakota in 1990.
“He took me over to this cliff, and he said, ‘Take a look,'” paleontologist Neal Larson, who worked with his brother on the excavation, says in the documentary. “I looked at it and I looked at him and I said, ‘Is that T. rex?’ He said, ‘Yes! And I think it’s all here.'”
After their mind-blowing discovery, Larson and his colleagues at the Black Hills Institute found themselves in a legal nightmare, fighting with Native American communities claiming Sue was excavated from their land as well as the US government, which asserted that the fossil was part of federal land and couldn’t be removed. (Black Hills eventually lost Sue and the fossil was auctioned for more than $8 million before going to the Field Museum.)
Check out a clip of the early moments of Sue’s discovery above. Dinosaur 13 will air on CNN at 9 p.m. Pacific/Eastern on Thursday.
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