On 12 August 1990 Susan Hendrickson, working with a crew from the Black Hills Institute of Geological Research in Hill City, found the most complete Tyrannosaurus rex ever recovered, weathering out of a bluff on Maurice Williams's ranch inside the Cheyenne River Sioux Reservation. The Institute dug for seventeen days, took out ten tons of bone, and wrote Williams a cheque for five thousand dollars, which he accepted and cashed. What nobody had obtained was the approval of the Secretary of the Interior, which the land being held in federal trust required. Federal agents seized the fossil on 14 May 1992, in a raid the Eighth Circuit's own account describes as dozens of FBI agents, park rangers and South Dakota National Guardsmen, acting on charges that carried at most ninety days in jail and a five hundred dollar fine. The bones went to the School of Mines in Rapid City, into what the court called a machine shop. The ownership question took until the end of 1993 and was answered against the diggers: because the sale had never been approved it was void, and title stayed with the United States in trust for Williams. Peter Larson of the Institute was sentenced to two years and served eighteen months, on customs charges about undeclared money and two misdemeanours over fossils taken from federal land, none of it about this dinosaur. Sotheby's sold her on 4 October 1997 for a hammer price of 7.6 million dollars, 8,362,500 with the buyer's premium, to the Field Museum in Chicago, backed by McDonald's and Disney. She went on permanent display in May 2000.
Getting there
43.9333, -103.5756
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