CNN Insight

A Dinosaur Named Sue

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

JONATHAN MANN, INSIGHT (voice-over): Indiana Jane - an American paleontologist leads a dinosaur out of the ground, through the courts, onto an auction house and then out to the world. After millions of years and millions of dollars, the dramatic debut of Sue.

(on camera): Hello, and welcome.

There are, in fact, two Sues are on our program today. But they'll be easy to tell apart. One is a tireless explorer, the other the dinosaur she unearthed. It's not quite a romance, but it does have its ups and downs and what some might consider a happy ending.

A Chicago museum is now proudly displaying the largest, most complete and best-preserved Tyrannosaurus Rex ever discovered, and both Sues are in the spotlight. We have this look from our colleagues at the CNN NEWSSTAND unit and Stephen Frazier.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

STEPHEN FRAZIER, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): Use these parts to imagine the whole. Each tooth is 12 inches long, serrated like a steak knife, replaceable like a shark's. She has 60.

The skull by itself is 5 1/2 feet long. The claws are all about speed. They think she could run 40 miles an hour.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: I thought those were razor sharp right there, those toenails.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Well, they're pretty sharp.

FRAZIER: And wouldn't you love to be one of these triplets - Jake, Nathan and Tyler Wilson - getting to touch the bones and getting to talk T-Rexes with the woman who discovered this one, Sue Hendrickson.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Maybe she used her arms to scratch other animals?

SUE HENDRICKSON: Yes, but they're so short.

FRAZIER: How cool is this?

(on camera): You thought that interest in dinosaurs would peak about 10 years ago.

HENDRICKSON: Oh, you know, I've been involved with dinosaurs for years, and the dinosaur mania back then - T-shirts, and stop you. And just there was so much out there. And those of us who worked with dinosaurs - well, it's got to peak, you know, it's going to peak and go down. It can't. But it goes on and on and on, which is fantastic.

There is something about these tremendous animals that are really mysterious and exciting, awesome, and we as humans, we want to be in awe of something.

FRAZIER (voice-over): Field Museum curator John Flynn is one human in awe.

JOHN FLYNN, FIELD MUSEUM CURATOR: And it's a tremendous rush to imagine an animal that was 12 feet high at the hips and 41 feet long, and weighed probably seven tons, as much as an elephant, staring you face to face.

We can learn more from this T-Rex specimen than any other specimen that's been discovered for that species before.

FRAZIER: All thanks to a high school dropout and teenaged runaway who is now the most productive amateur explorer in the field and who likes to say she felt something calling to her during a dig in South Dakota in 1990.

HENDRICKSON: And I think she really waited and I think she really wanted to be found. I think she desperately wanted to be found. Somehow she knew we were leaving. Had we left and not looked there, I doubt if anyone ever would have looked there in the next 50 to 100 years. She probably never would have been found, would have weathered away.

FRAZIER: All she could see were three bones exposed by erosion.

HENDRICKSON: And they were very hollow, like bird bones, which is also a very big indication of a carnivorous dinosaur. So I knew, you know, I'm just going through all this, you know, process it. Carnivorous dinosaur, really big, late cretaceous - T-Rex. You know, I said wow.

FRAZIER: She was working for a commercial fossil hunter. They paid the land owner for the fossil and got it out of the ground in days, and as is the custom, they named the dinosaur for its discover, Sue.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: We are seizing the fossils as evidence in a criminal matter, in a criminal investigation.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

FRAZIER: But then the FBI and the National Guard seized the fossil during a four-way legal battle over ownership of the land and of the fossil itself. It took seven years before the original land owner got custody back.

He sent the fossil, in 135 crates, to Sotheby's in New York to be sold at auction, and that's when the public got its first look.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: $500,000, opening at $500,000.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

FRAZIER: They thought Sue would sell for a million dollars. Final price after commission - a cool eight million.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: 7.6 million.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

FRAZIER: But the T-Rex was just one of a string of dramatic discoveries in Sue Hendrickson's swashbuckling career, which began when she threw out her plans for college.

HENDRICKSON: I'm good at finding things, really lucky or whatever it is.

FRAZIER: Her earliest finds were underwater. She caught tropical fish for aquariums around the world, worked as a shell diver, then a salvage diver.

HENDRICKSON: Being a woman in mostly a man's world of work, I always had to work harder to prove yourself. I had to prove I was equal, and to be equal you had to be better.

FRAZIER: Salvage turned to marine archaeology. She was the only woman on the team that discovered Cleopatra's palace and the ancient royal port of Alexandria, Egypt, lost underwater for two millennia after an earthquake and tidal wave washed it away.

(on camera): Does it feel like you're swimming through a city that just dropped? Are you going through a grid?

HENDRICKSON: Right. The buildings have all tumbled and broken. There are thousands of columns broken, you know, big chunks, smaller chunks. But once you're there, some of the docks that have been cleaned up, they're still level. If you could raise them up 20 feet, you could drive your chariot down them today.

It's awesome, the preservation.

FRAZIER (voice-over): With another team, she located a military grave of huge historic significance - Napoleon's naval fleet, sunk by England's Admiral Nelson in the Battle of the Nile.

HENDRICKSON: When you find the personal things, like the shoes of people or the jewelry, I think who was wearing it when they died, you know, what were they going through?

FRAZIER (on camera): All right. Here's a list of things people say you're good at - extinct crustaceans, ancient olive jars, Ming vases, fossils, Chinese shipwrecks, South American geology, marine mammals.

Did I leave anything out?

HENDRICKSON: Oh, sure.

FRAZIER: What else?

DAVID GRIMALDI, AMERICAN MUSEUM OF NATURAL HISTORY: She really does embody the persona of an Indiana Jones.

FRAZIER (voice-over): Dr. David Grimaldi is curator in etymology at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City.

GRIMALDI: Dashing through jungles, you know, in peril, that sort of stuff. But really I think no one would epitomize that kind of person that really -- that true explorer type of individual more than Susan.

Susan has been more places, more remote places, doing more sorts of fundamental discoveries than anyone I know.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

GRIMALDI: This is a small swarm of stingless bees that were caught harvesting resin for their nest.

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FRAZIER: David Grimaldi's specialty, ancient insects fossilized in amber, is where Sue Hendrickson first came to the attention of scientists.

GRIMALDI: Our best pieces -- and we have a very, very good collection of amber fossils here, one of the best in the world. Our best specimens come from Susan.

FRAZIER: By the way, insects in amber. Sound familiar?

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP, "JURASSIC PARK")

UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR: Bingo, dino DNA.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

FRAZIER: Oh, yes, "Jurassic Park." In the movie, they got dinosaur DNA from a mosquito frozen in amber. So that's where the idea came from.

Something else from the movie echoes Sue Hendrickson's career - the tension between science and commerce. Not everyone is delighted that Sue the dinosaur brought $8 million at auction.

KEITH RIGBY, NOTRE DAME UNIVERSITY: Essentially, everything turned at that sale. As soon as that hammer fell, the world of paleontology, the part of paleontology that I'm particularly involved in changed. It has unquestionably raised the price of dinosaur research not only in the United States, but worldwide.

FRAZIER: Professor Keith Rigby of Notre Dame University learned that firsthand after finding a T-Rex as big as Sue in Montana. Somebody plundered the dig.

RIGBY: Body hunters came in, removed significant portions of the skull.

HENDRICKSON: There are a couple of these academic paleontologists who have really said this, which I can't believe they could -- they're bright guys -- that they could say this, that they would rather have those fossils wash away than have a non-Ph.D. pick it up. They would rather have it destroyed. They're not dealing with reality. Reality is that probably 90 some or more percent of all fossils in all museums in the world are found by non-Ph.D., non-academic paleontologists.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Air abrasion is the last step in fossil preparation.

FRAZIER: And that's where the fossil Sue comes in. Already, her bones are talking to scientists about life 65 million years ago - a dream specimen, all the Field Museum and its corporate partners, McDonald's and Disney, had hoped for. Yes, corporate partners. Ask curator John Flynn how many natural history museums have $8 million to pay for a skeleton.

FLYNN: For me, that question really isn't, was it worth it? It was, did we have to do it? And the answer is clearly, yes, we had to save that specimen for science.

FRAZIER: McDonald's also paid for this glass-walled lab at the field, where experts preparing Sue's bones for display are on display themselves, and for a CAT scan of Sue's skull. There's the brain cavity there, big as a cucumber. And based on the nerve pathways, we now know she could sniff like a bloodhound and see at seven miles what we see at one.

HENDRICKSON: A small brain with teeth that big and being able to smell that well and probably be -- having a good sense of hearing, she didn't need to think, you know?

FRAZIER (on camera): You theorize that she had a tough life?

HENDRICKSON: Yes, she had many injuries.

FRAZIER: What would make life difficult for a T-Rex?

HENDRICKSON: Well, the crushing of her tail vertebrae, you know, there's some severe damage there.

FRAZIER: But who could do that to her?

HENDRICKSON: That's -- well, it's speculated that it could have been mating, which is common in crocodiles and other reptiles in their mating, the tail got stepped on, you know. There's a lot to be learned from the injuries.

FRAZIER (voice-over): Others understand the educational value of the dinosaur and the discoverer, which is why earlier this month she was called forward by the University of Illinois.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: In recognition of your work and upon the recommendation of the senate of the Chicago campus, I am honored to present you to the presidents of the university for the honorary degree of Doctor of Humane Letters.

FRAZIER: The woman who dropped out of high school is now Dr. Susan Hendrickson.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: We invest you with this hood and present you with this diploma.

HENDRICKSON: I was introduced in very, very nice fashion. The closing was that I was the queen of lost and found, which I really think says it all.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

MANN: A beautiful story all about bones. Is it more salesmanship than science, though? A conversation when we come back. Stay with us.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

MANN (voice-over): Going to the heart of a long-held theory. Scientists in the United States recently peered into a fossil with the CT scan technology and found, to their surprise, that the fossil was a dinosaur heart and that it had four highly developed chambers.

(on camera): Welcome back.

That discovery is turning the world of paleontology upside down. Most reptiles have three-chambered hearts, a design that makes them cold-blooded. Until very recently, it was thought that dinosaurs may not have evolved hearts that pumped warm blood. Now it appears that some dinosaurs at least may have been equipped with just that kind of a heart, allowing them to cope with temperature extremes.

What lessons does T-Rex Sue have for paleontology? Thomas Holtz is a vertebrate paleontologist at the University of Maryland, an expert on dinosaurs and especially on the T-Rex. Professor, thanks for being with us. Sue has been launched like a Hollywood movie.

There's a lot of excitement. There's a lot of hype. Are scientists, though, as excited as children and museum goers seem to be?

THOMAS HOLTZ, UNIVERSITY OF MARYLAND: Well, some of us certainly are. T-Rex in particular has always been a fascinating creature to me and to many of my colleagues. And in fact, I made a Tyrannosaurus Rex and its close relatives the subject of my main topic of research. So I was very excited with the discovery of the specimen and now that it's finally on display to get a chance to see the details of this creature.

MANN: People have been studying, you've been studying T-Rexes for a while. What does one more specimen add to accumulated knowledge?

HOLTZ: Well, despite its popularity, T-Rex is actually a relatively poorly known creature. It's only known from a few dozen specimens of which this is the first very complete specimen. So it gives us information on parts of the body - for example, the tail and parts of the vertebrae and so forth - which were previously unknown.

Additionally, it's the largest known T-Rex specimen, and so it tells us something about how they changed as they got larger and larger, that is, as they got older and older.

MANN: Now, I gather that Sue, in particular, has a wishbone - something most of us know from around the dinner table. What does that tell you?

HOLTZ: Well, in recent years, it's become apparent that many of the carnivorous dinosaurs, including things like the T-Rex, had wishbones. And in fact, there's only one other group of creature alive or that ever existed with the wishbone, and those are birds. And this is yet another of those lines of skeletal evidence that demonstrates that birds are the direct descendants of meat-eating dinosaurs and, in fact, on modern classification terms are a type of meat-eating dinosaur.

MANN: The bones, that wishbone included, are now on display. They're exhibits in a museum. Does that mean that scientists don't really have access to them anymore, that this isn't a scientific adventure anymore, it's now a museum exhibit?

HOLTZ: Well, the folks - the technicians and the staff at the Field Museum were actually very ingenuous with this particular mount. The way it's designed, an individual scientist can now have access to a particular bone which can be removed from the mount without disturbing the rest of the mount.

And additionally, the skull - the actual physical skull - is at ground level, where it's easier for a researcher to get access to it and actually for the public to view it better. And they mounted a cast of the skull on top of the specimen. It works out better engineering wise as well because the skull's about a ton and to perch a ton up there 18 feet above the public might have been a safety hazard.

MANN: We're looking people enjoying the skeleton while we talk. Access, as you mentioned, is a very important issue because this skeleton was purchased for $8 million. And in our report we heard from one scientist who said that paleontology will now be changed by how valuable bones like these have become. Do you think that's true?

HOLTZ: There's certainly a danger of that, and I have to tell you I have gone to museums where my students or people just walking around will ask me, "Well, how much is that skeleton worth? Or how much would that skeleton be worth?" As if there were a particular dollar figure associated with skeletons.

And the danger many of us feared with the purchase of Sue originally was the commoditization of fossils, where they would be sold for their numerical value which could potentially keep them out of the hands of museums and researchers who will have - who wouldn't have access to them for their particular scientific details.

MANN: How much of a transition would that be, how much of a precedent? Were fossils like these given away or traded for free before?

HOLTZ: Well, there actually has been a long tradition of cooperation between some commercial collectors - people who go out and look for fossils for profit - and museums. One of the main issues I had with Sue was the exorbitant price that it wound up being. $8.3 million is not the kind of money that most research institutions have in order to get many specimens, much less one specimen. It exceeds the normal research budget of most museums.

So the fear was that good quality, scientifically significant and general public significant specimens might start to get out of the range of access to museums and only the odd multimillionaire out there might be able to acquire them for his own personal use or his own personal home.

MANN: Or someone with a pickax and a toothbrush and a lot of time to spend. We have just a moment. But what are the chances of someone finding the next Sue? How many fossils are there like this around, and how lucky do you have to be to get one?

HOLTZ: Well, you certainly do need the luck, and this is where people like Susan Hendrickson, who has had extreme luck, as your video showed, in discovering specimens of all sorts. You also have to have the time to get out there and find it, and there certainly are other significant specimens out there.

New dinosaur species are found all the time. Twenty new species were named last year. Not all of them with the sort of fanfare that Sue had, but 20 whole new species. So there are new T-Rexes to be found. There are new other meat eaters to be found, and all, of course, the great diversity of plant eating dinosaurs.

Who knows what will be found? Who knows what's being found right now by someone walking in the hills of South Dakota or Montana?

MANN: Thomas Holtz of the University of Maryland, thanks very much.

HOLTZ: Thank you.

MANN: In fact, you don't have to go digging to see a dinosaur and you don't have to go to a museum either. When we come back - a look at some of the greatest prehistoric performances ever put on film. Stay with us.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

MANN (voice-over): No one is sure what dinosaurs looked like. The color of their skin, for example, is a matter of conjecture. Scientists do tend to doubt that dinosaurs could talk, but the people at Disney, who are about to release their own "Dinosaur," an animated movie, may provoke a whole new debate.

(on camera): Welcome back.

Ever see a dinosaur? Of course, you have. It was probably moving and roaring and trying to frighten somebody or eat them. We can all think back to the dinosaur movies of our past on a day like today, and we invited Howard Karen of Premiere magazine to come by earlier today to talk about a few.

One of them, Disney's new film, "Dinosaur."

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

HOWARD KAREN, PREMIERE MAGAZINE: I thought it was great. It's Disney's "Dinosaur," and it's coming after many, many years of preparation. Computer-generated animation, incredibly effective, really well-written and might actually be a little violent for younger kids. But a very compelling story.

MANN: Are you moved by talking dinosaurs? Does it seem realistic?

KAREN: The way they do it is very clever. I mean, they sort of ease into it. It happens after about the first 10 minutes that they start talking. And by that point, you are so used to the style of animation, the style of story-telling, the way the camera moves that it just seems very natural. And it's actually relief because you don't have to have only visual story-telling.

MANN: We would be remiss if we didn't compare it to what has to the classic dinosaur movie of all time, a fairly recently one, "Jurassic Park." How does "Jurassic Park" compare, and how does "Jurassic Park" stand on its own with a few years looking back?

KAREN: I think "Jurassic Park" stands up well. The thing about "Jurassic Park" you have to remember is that it is basically a horror movie. And "Dinosaur" is the family movie and it's a human drama. It's a very, very different kind of film, and dinosaurs usually were in horror movies. They were meant to scare the living daylights out of you, and in Spielberg's movies they do.

MANN: Can you think of any other dinosaur movies that are worth seeing, when you look back at all of the ones that have been made over the years?

KAREN: You know, when I do look back, most of them are pretty darned cheesy. And in that vein, I think my favorite ones are the Japanese ones like "Mothra" and "Godzilla" and "Rodan." At least there, you know that you're enjoying junk for junk's sake.

MANN: Now, I seem to recall a Godzilla remake, an American one just a few years ago. Do I have that right?

KAREN: Yes.

MANN: Did you see that?

KAREN: No, I didn't. But I've seen parts of it, and I think the problem with that is that it probably tried to take itself too seriously, wasn't enough humor in it.

MANN: You see movies for a living, so let me ask you if you hear there's a new dinosaur movie coming out, are you tempted to go or are you tempted to avoid it or are you tempted to go with someone's children?

KAREN: I think they're very compelling. To me, there is the animated sequence in "Fantasia" to the "Rite of Spring" was fascinating for it was just history. It was just geologic and biological history. And I don't know how faithful the Disney movie is to this, particularly the fact that they're speaking English, but the idea of a comet hitting the earth and causing nuclear-type damage and how these animals adjust to it is very compelling.

I can't tell you how much I enjoyed myself, and I think anyone would if they went to see it.

MANN: Is there something inherently appealing, magnetic about dinosaurs. There are a lot of movies about cowboys, a lot of movies about policemen and detectives and soldiers. Do dinosaurs take their place among those archetypes of film-making?

KAREN: Yes, I think when kids go to museums, science museums on field trips and they see these huge skeletons and fossils, it's curious to see them fleshed out, to see these monstrous creatures, these enormous creatures. And you know, to kids, size is very important. Things that are bigger than them, things that tower over the earth and make enormous noises whenever they stamp on the ground, yes, of course, they're attracted to it, and I think there's an element of that that stays with you as an adult.

MANN: Howard Karen of Premiere magazine, thanks so much for this.

KAREN: Thank you. Thanks for inviting me.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

MANN: And that's INSIGHT. Stay with us. More news to come.

END

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