Sue, the most complete fossil of a tyrannosaurus Rex ever found, was auctioned Saturday for $8.36 million to the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago.
The auction, which involved nine bidders, took only nine minutes to achieve a record price for the sale of a fossil.The auctioneer at Sotheby's who officiated during the nine-minute bidding, David Redden, called the winning bid an "incredibly strong price."
Many scientists expressed relief that the valuable fossil would remain in the United States in an educational institution.
The actual bid for the fossil was $7.6 million, but with a 10 percent buyer's premium, the total came to $8.36 million.
Speaking for the Field Museum, John McCarter Jr. said money for the fossil had been provided by McDonald's Corp., Ronald McDonald House Charities, Walt Disney World Resort, the California State University System and private individuals.
Sue's remains have yet to be studied in detail, but the bones so far freed from their rocky cocoons attest to a violent life and death. Gashes by serrated dinosaur teeth blemishing her skull and some of her bones are evidence of mortal battles, one of which may have ended Sue's life some 65 million years ago.
Sue frequently sustained painful wounds and her final years were apparently made all the worse by gout - an agonizing disease caused by the accumulation of uric acid crystals in the joints between bones.
Sue's body was quickly buried by flowing water and sediment, which hardened into rock and protected her bones almost perfectly for millions of years. But wind and weather wore away the rock as the earth aged, and on Aug. 12, 1990, a flat tire brought Sue into the modern world.
A field truck owned by the Black Hills Institute of Geological Research, a commercial fossil dealer in Hill City, S.D., had wandered into the place where Sue lay entombed. The Black Hills fossil prospectors had sought and received permission from a landowner, Maurice Williams, a Sioux Indian, to scout his badlands property for bones, knowing it to be a rich site of late Cretaceous treasure.
A flat tire temporarily halted the survey, and the prospectors, led by Peter Larson, president of the institute, left to get help. But the men left behind Susan Hendrickson, a free-lance field paleontologist who was working with Larson's company.
As Hendrickson waited for the others to return, she strolled around the site, looked up and spotted a gigantic femur and three articulated vertebrae protruding from a cliff face about seven feet above her head. She immediately recognized them as belonging to a dinosaur: "a carnivore and definitely big, which for that area could only mean one thing," she later said.
Hendrickson had found the largest and best preserved tyrannosaur ever discovered, and in her honor, Larson named it Sue.
The Black Hills Institute promptly struck a deal with the landowner, Williams, by which the company paid $5,000 for the right to excavate, remove and assume ownership of the bones.
But in 1992, an assistant U.S. attorney, Kevin Schieffer, charged that the Black Hills Institute, in failing to obtain the necessary permission from various federal agencies, had committed theft by taking a fossil from land that lay within an Indian reservation.
Twenty-eight government officials, including FBI agents and National Guard troops, took over the Black Hills Institute, seizing Sue and many other fossils, as well as the company's financial and research records.
Sue's bones, most of them still encased in the protective plaster jackets in which the Black Hills Institute had moved them from Williams' land, were locked under seal in a furnace room at the South Dakota School of Mines and Technology.
After a long series of court tests and appeals, the government's action was upheld, and in 1994 ownership of Sue was assigned to Williams, who had already received $5,000.
By federal consent, Sotheby's was selected to dispose of Sue on behalf of Williams, who will receive the bulk of the proceeds.