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Baddest-to-the-bone
By Burl Burlingame
T-rex coming soon
Star-BulletinPALEONTOLOGIST Sue Hendrickson was poking around South Dakota's fossil-rich Badlands in 1990 when she spotted some bone fragments at the base of a bluff, looked up and spotted enormous vertebrae bones emerging from the cliff face.
She knew immediately that it belonged to Tyrannosaurus Rex, the biggest, baddest junkyard dog of prehistoric times, a 7-ton land shark with a chainsaw mouth of foot-long razor-edged blades, big and fast and strong enough to run down a new Volkswagen Beetle and pry it open like a can of Spam for the pink meat inside. "Rex" is Latin for king, and nothing has yet been discovered that would knock T-rex off its throne as ruler of the meat-eaters.
A life-sized display of Hendrickson's assembled T-rex fossil is coming to Bishop Museum this summer, but more of that anon.
Since the first "tyrant lizard king" was discovered exactly 100 years ago, it has become one of the enduring symbols of nature's raw power. It's also as big a mystery today as the day it was discovered, and scientists continue to debate its place in the natural world.
Just 20 or so Tyrannosaurus skeletons have been discovered, but the one that Hendrickson discovered -- nicknamed, naturally, "Sue" -- is the largest and most complete. It's about 90 percent there, and took paleontologists 17 days to dig out of the cliff-face and two years of lab work to clean and prepare the bones. The work was done by the the Black Hills Institute of Geological Research, a commercial fossil supplier to the world's museums.
Whilst this was occurring, lawyers began to gather in buzzardy flocks. The fossil was discovered on the land of Maurice Williams, a native American of the Cheyenne River Sioux tribe, who sold the rights to BHIGR for $5,000. Federal agents tried to nix the deal, maintaining the government has first call on what is done with Indian lands.
Was the dinosaur named Sue part of the land, or something found in the land? Eventually, a court decided the fossil belonged both to Williams and the Bureau of Indian Affairs. In 1996 Sotheby's brokered an auction of the find, selling it for $8.36 million, the highest price ever paid for what is essentially a pile of mineralized bones.
The winning bidder was the Field Museum in Chicago, with massive financial help from McDonald's, Walt Disney World, the California State University system and lots of private citizens.
The original Sue goes on display at the Field Museum this spring. Luckily for us, two exact copies of the fossil were cast for traveling shows, one for the East Coast, and Bishop Museum premieres the West Coast edition this summer.
Sue is not only the largest T-rex skeleton ever recovered, but as near as paleontologists can tell, the dinosaur died a natural death.
We'll give more details as the show gets closer. Previous dinosaur exhibits at Bishop Museum have proved to be their most popular shows. "Dinosaurs capture the imagination of all humankind," points out Bishop Museum director W. Donald Duckworth. "We are primarily about education and life-long learning, which is built upon research such as this. We let the Field Museum know there were museums out west OTHER than California."
This one is boostered by contributions from McDonald's, Ronald McDonald House Charities, Meadow Gold Dairies, Hawaiian Electric and GTE Hawaiian Tel.
Hate to disappoint our readers, but that photograph of a life-size Tyrannosaurus rex in front of Bishop Museum is a special-effect, a visual trick. It was really there, just not life-size. Stunted growth
In Hollywood it would be called a combination of "forced perspective" and "live matting." Star-Bulletin photographer Dean Sensui put a camera on a locked-down tripod and aimed it at the front of Hawaiian Hall with some real live people arranged on the grass, pretending to gaze up at the "dinosaur." Right in front of the camera, he put a scale model of a Tyrannosaurus sculpted by Nuuanu master modeleer Michael Furuya. It's only about 18 inches long. It was adjusted to appear in the spot at the proper scale in the final picture, and the camera's lens aperture "stopped down" so everything near-to-far would be in focus.
A picture was taken, and then the model moved away and another picture taken of exactly the same angle. The second frame of film was used to digitally transplant foreground grass to cover up the model's base and support.Sensui completed the composite image by tweaking it in a computer adding shadows by hand
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