COLUMN ONE : Monstrous Bones of Contention : The best <i> Tyrannosaurus rex</i> skeleton in history has been discovered. But do the activities of private fossil hunters like those who found ‘Sue’ serve the interests of science?

In the legends of the Lakota-speaking tribes, the prehistoric fossils entombed in the local cliffs are evil spirits, swallowed up by the Creator so the bands of the Sioux nation could settle nearby.

Now the dinosaurs are being mined, and it doesn’t seem far-fetched to wonder if evil spirits are once more at large in the land.

Two years have passed, two years of troubles, since commercial fossil hunters hauled away the hardened bones of an ancient giant turtle, a duck-billed dinosaur and the most precious prize of all: one of 11 Tyrannosaurus rex skeletons found to date--the largest, most complete and best preserved. The T. rex was nicknamed “Sue” after its discoverer and was hailed as a major find.

In May, the bones were hauled away again, this time from the fossil company by a federal seizure team that included nine FBI agents and a contingent from the South Dakota National Guard. The acting U.S. attorney, Kevin V. Schieffer, said he needed the fossils as evidence in a grand jury investigation. No charges have yet been filed. But Sue, Schieffer has alleged in civil court documents, was removed illegally from government property as part of “on-going, multi-state criminal activity.”

Now the fossil hunters, the Cheyenne River Sioux and the United States of America each claims to be the rightful owner.

Since the confiscation, the fossils have been locked away while the question of their fate ignited protests around the state, fueled racial tensions between American Indians and whites and focused attention on the Plains states’ growing fossil industry, which sells dinosaur remains to museums, universities and private collectors worldwide.

Paleontologists and politicians alike are divided over how much to regulate the business, especially trade in fossils unearthed on public land--and public land is not always easy to define in this part of the country. The “Sue” case shows how tough it can be to divine the best interests of science at a time when academics have few resources for digs and the fossils are weathering away.

“I waffle. I just admit it, I waffle,” said South Dakota Gov. George S. Mickelson, referring to the general situation. “I know there’s a problem with people making a lot of money out of things found on public land. But it’s the private sector . . . that has the potential for leveraging the resources for scientific study.”

At the time of the seizure, the fossil hunters from the Black Hills Institute of Geological Research had spent two years on restoration work at their headquarters in tiny Hill City. Even with much of the skeleton still encased in chunks of cliff, the painstaking process yielded new information about the largest carnivores the world has ever known. The company invited paleontologists from dozens of academic and government institutions to study the freed portion of the remains.

A snarl of court proceedings under way will apportion economic as well as scientific treasure. Dinosaur fossils more common than the fabled T. rex have fetched as much as $350,000. Extremely realistic casts of the originals also can be sold.

The Cheyenne River Sioux believe that a museum with Sue on display could attract enough tourists to make a dent in the 70% unemployment rate on their isolated reservation. In Hill City, seven miles from Mt. Rushmore, Black Hills Institute President Peter Larson wants to make Sue the centerpiece of his own exhibit hall. Like the American Indians, more than 100 miles to the north and east, Hill City’s residents look upon Sue as a potential savior--a better inducement to stop and spend than the fictional cowboy shootouts re-enacted on the town’s main street most nights.

For three days in May, it was the FBI and the National Guard that came to visit Hill City. About 30 agents, forest service and National Park Service staffers surrounded the former town auditorium that houses the Black Hills Institute. As the fossils were loaded into crates and onto a truck, angry crowds gathered, waving fists and shouting.

During the packing, Sue’s fossilized orbital bone, from behind the eye, was broken. Larson’s brother and partner accidentally struck it with a wooden pallet. Neal Larson also confessed to having changed the dates on some of the institute’s fossil containers--those holding other specimens taken at the same time as Sue. Rumors about the raid had reached the institute beforehand, he said, and he had panicked--”a stupid thing” to do, the Larsons’ attorneys wrote.

The authorities transported 10 tons all told--the separated bones and the portion of the skeleton still wedded to the rock. They took the Larsons’ records too. Their destination was a machine shop at the South Dakota School of Mines and Technology in Rapid City. Today, locked in a huge aluminum container next to a yellow forklift, the finest Tyrannosaurus rex specimen on Earth waits, unassembled and most of it unexamined. And the custody battle drags on.

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Sixty-five million years ago, Sue weighed 8 tons and measured 41 feet in length, 50 feet in height from uplifted head to toe. The dinosaur stalked through vast sequoia forests not far from a sea.

The reservation landscape is nothing like that now. These days, warm breezes carry the sweet scent of sage. Cattle low and beetles hum. The prairie grasses are interspersed with low cacti and scattered stands of native ash.

Hills and ridges end abruptly in banded sandstone cliffs, like those on Section 30, leased from the tribe by Sharkey Williams, and Section 32, his brother Maurice’s ranch.

It wasn’t until 1990 that the Williams brothers learned that the Black Hills Institute had been digging outside the reservation, just across the border, since 1979. The crew worked at a spot they called the Ruth Mason Dinosaur Quarry in honor of the landowner who leased it to them for $100 a year.

The quarry site contains the remains of more than 10,000 duck-billed dinosaurs. “What this represents,” Larson said, “is an entire herd of dinosaurs annihilated at one time.” The company has mounted and sold 92 left femurs and six complete fossilized skeletons, Larson said, to museums in Wales, Ireland and Japan. A seventh went to the University of Wisconsin at Madison in exchange for volunteer student labor, and the institute is working on an eighth.

The Williams brothers were intrigued. They invited the fossil hunters to look around on their adjoining spreads. Larson recalls telling Maurice Williams: “If we find anything, we’ll give you a little bit.”

Sometime afterward, Larson says, crew member Susan Hendrickson--his girlfriend at the time--took a walk through the Williams’ ranchland. She returned with two pieces of finger-sized bone.

He recognized them instantly as little scraps of T. rex. “There’s more,” she told him, grinning.

The two ran several miles back to the site. Seven feet up a mesa on Maurice Williams’ land, an eight-foot length of bone jutted out. “I know, I just know it’s all there,” Larson remembers thinking.

He asked his brother to buy 1,000 pounds of plaster. It was obvious to both that the material was for wrapping the exposed bones of some discovery, but Larson refused to provide specifics. He didn’t want to alert the press. He didn’t want witnesses. “I was afraid that somebody was going to take it away,” Larson said, “or would try to talk the rancher into letting them dig” instead.

Within 17 days, 10 tons of rock containing the labeled pieces of the newly christened Sue were Hill City-bound.

Everyone in these parts, of course, has known for decades that fossils can be easily identified in much of the Midwest and West, where the vegetation is sparse and the rock around them erodes. That was why, during the Depression, the Works Project Administration chose as its Rapid City project the construction of Dinosaur Park, seven lifelike models on a ridge that cuts through town. More than one rancher herded sheep past huge rust-colored shapes in the cliffs, suspecting, correctly, that dinosaurs were hiding inside.

But few cared all that much until the past decade or so, when dinosaurs became a popular theme for clothes, mugs, books and toys. Experts say they suspect that the consumer fads may be the reason that interest in fossils took off too.

A Japanese company contacted one Montana paleontologist with an offer of $4 million for a T. rex. The receptionist for a La Jolla physician inquired about the availability of North Dakota fossils to decorate the office.

Demand has bred suppliers, some, like Larson, with geology degrees and a longtime interest in fossils, and some without. To hear the critics tell it, commercial fossil operations could make scholarly paleontology as extinct as the dinosaurs themselves.

James E. Martin, a paleontologist at the School of Mines where Sue is stored, said he was denied permission this year to return to a private ranch where he had been excavating a mosasaurus, a sea reptile more than 75 million years old. “A commercial outfit,” he said, “went in and offered to pay.”

The prospect of profits can lead to tragic results. John W. Hoganson, a paleontologist with the North Dakota Geological Survey, says a rancher in his state recently invited him to look over some exposed dinosaur fossils. Hoganson thought it might be a triceratops, a significant but relatively common find. The state had no money to purchase the fossil, he told the rancher, but a donation could lead to tax credits.

Then the rancher contacted at least three commercial collectors, who estimated the skeleton’s worth at several thousand dollars. “The rancher and some friends took some spades, shovels and a cooler of beer and proceeded to dig,” Hoganson said. The skull was destroyed. The dinosaur turned out to be a rare torosaurus.

“This,” Hoganson said, “made me mad.” But he said he couldn’t blame the rancher, “not in the fourth year of drought.”

Consequently, many academic paleontologists say they’ve all but given up on collecting on private land. So they get especially worked up when they think about commercial activity on public property.

“People who go out just to collect can easily beat me,” said William A. Akersten, curator of vertebrate paleontology at the Idaho Museum of Natural History in Pocatello and a member of the Idaho State University faculty. “I have grant proposals to write, classes to teach.”

A bill introduced in July by Sen. Max Baucus (D-Mont.) would prohibit fossil hunting for profit on federal, state and American-Indian land.

Commercial fossil collectors say enactment of the measure would be a big mistake. “To shut it all off just for select individuals is not right,” said Edward Cole, who with his wife runs Ancient Critters, based in Delta, Utah. “That’s not the American way.”

Cole and others in the business say their efforts in the field save petrified remains that would otherwise be eaten away by the same erosive processes exposing them in the first place. If the dinosaurs disappear before anyone can study them, they ask, how will that advance knowledge of prehistory?

Indeed, Sue was preserved only because the Black Hills Institute was working next door, Larson pointed out.

And as the bones were separated from the rock, and cleaned to a gloss, the T. rex offered many new insights into dinosaur life.

For one thing, Larson thinks he has found a way to differentiate female from male dinosaurs by the size of a few tailbones. He suspects he was working on a girl.

Each of Sue’s legs had been broken, at different times, and had healed over, meaning she had lived through the injuries. “Either she could move about with a broken leg,” Larson said, “or else--and this is my theory--she had a mate that fed her.”

Interestingly, Larson said, Sue was found with the remains of three other tyrannosauruses . One was only 18 inches in length. “Could this have been Mom, Dad, Junior and Baby?” he asked. “No one would ever have expected that. T. rex has always been viewed as a lone hunter, a lone scavenger.”

There is a less tender side to the picture. Although scholars have in the past pictured T. rex with three or four fingers, they were guessing; no complete arms and hands have been found before. Larson said Sue provides evidence for only two working fingers. And by the way they were attached, “I believe that their (fingers) were like ice tongs,” he said. “If the prey moved away, it would actually get pinched tighter.”

Sue also had a piece of a tooth from another T. rex embedded in her neck, and two tail vertebrae smashed and fused together. Later, a stupendous fight must have led to the dinosaur’s death--the left side of the lower jaw was still in place, but the back was pulled out and rotated. The jaw wounds never healed.

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To the officials of the Cheyenne River Sioux, this information is fascinating, but Larson isn’t necessarily the one who should be ferreting it out.

The ranchers who allowed the excavations are tribal members and cannot stake full claim to the property they use. The cliffs are within the reservation’s borders, so the tribal government says it should control the fossils. “Our people are stewards of the land. It’s our responsibility,” said tribal Atty. Gen. Steven C. Emery, “not just for the here and now but unto the seventh generation.”

He leaned forward across his desk. “You want to know how we found out about it?” he asked. “An article appeared in the Rapid City Journal announcing this major find. But they didn’t make any announcement in the press until well after it was off the reservation.”

The land where Sue was found was held in trust by the U.S. government, under a longtime arrangement that shields American-Indian owners from property taxes in return for federal oversight of all transactions. So the federal government says the U.S. secretary of the Interior and the Smithsonian Institution should be deciding what happens to the skeletons. “I would like to see them remain in South Dakota,” Schieffer said. But there would be no guarantees.

These days, Maurice Williams refers to Larson as “that damn crook.” Williams contends that he told Larson “many times” that any digging on his ranch had to be cleared with the Bureau of Indian Affairs, in the form of the reservation superintendent. “He chose not to do it,” Williams said. “I assumed that he had.” Larson paid him $5,000, he confirmed. But the money, he said, was for damage to the land, not for the fossils themselves.

Larson denies this account, and tribal officials said they have their doubts too. Williams would not let tribal authorities onto his property around the time the dig was taking place, tribal chairman Gregg Bourland said, and he actually spent a night in jail for keeping a game warden away.

Eventually, when Schieffer took office, tribal officials asked him to pick the Sue case out of the legal nether world where it was languishing. When Schieffer obliged, the tribe’s leaders believe, many of the state’s whites were surprised and resentful.

“The day the T. rex was seized, there were a lot of remarks (about American Indians) flowing in Hill City,” he said. “There was an Indian businessman (there) who contacted me; he was worried about his business.”

Bourland thinks the “free Sue” protests that have followed, in Hill City, Rapid City and the capital, Pierre, had a similar flavor. “The real message is still under the surface: ‘How dare the U.S. attorney come into a town like Hill City on the behalf of an Indian tribe?”’ Bourland said. “The whole emphasis here is racism, pure and true.”

But Larson’s attorney, Patrick Duffy, says it is Schieffer that the American Indians should be wary of: “If the U.S. government owns fossils found within reservation boundaries, who owns the mineral rights? The fishing rights?”

Indeed, perhaps inevitably, the Sioux expect to file their own lawsuit in the next month or so. “The tribe has legal rights to protect,” Emery said.

Dinosaur at Rest, Once Again

The discovery of the skeleton of a Tyrannosaurus rex has ignited protests and fueled racial tensions in South Dakota. Here are the key incidents in the case:

1. Fossil hunters find the skeleton entombed in the sandstone cliffs of the Cheyenne River Sioux Reservation.

2. Ten tons of rock containing the giant dinosaur--nicknamed “Sue” after its discoverer--are hauled to Hill City, near Mt. Rushmore, for restoration work.

3. In May, the FBI and National Guard seize the hardened bones and transport the load to Rapid City. On a college campus there, Sue rests in crates while a court battles rages and a criminal investigation proceeds.