From Emma at sluttyprimarysource aka Past Life, Present Cleavage substack, September 28:
Sue
On the morning of August 12, 1990, a truck belonging to the Black Hills Institute got a flat tire outside Faith, South Dakota. The crew had spent the summer on a ranch owned by a man named Maurice Williams digging up duck billed dinosaurs, and they were basically done. The men stayed with the tire. Sue Hendrickson took her golden retriever, Gypsy, and walked off into the fog toward some cliffs nobody had checked yet.
She was forty. She had dropped out of high school at seventeen and drifted state to state with a boyfriend before landing in Florida, diving for tropical fish to sell to aquariums and fishing lobster on the side. After that came shipwrecks, and after the shipwrecks came the Dominican Republic, where a miner up in the amber mines showed her an insect trapped in amber and she was, as she tells it, hooked on the spot. By her own account she became one of the top experts in the world on fossils in amber. No degree. I honestly think that's part of why she was so good, she never had anybody telling her where not to look, she just went where the stuff was, and I would follow that woman into any fog.
So the woman walking toward that cliff had spent the eighties pulling ancient bugs out of amber, which is the entire premise of a novel that hadn't come out yet.
At the bottom of a bluff she found broken pieces of bone in the dirt. She looked up. About eight feet over her head, vertebrae were sticking straight out of the rock.
She carried pieces back to camp, and Peter Larson, who ran the institute, has said the team literally ran to the site. It was a Tyrannosaurus rex, roughly 90 percent of it. They named it after her.
Sue Hendrickson at the Sue site, South Dakota, 1990.
Three months later Knopf published Michael Crichton's Jurassic Park, a novel about a very rich old man who clones dinosaurs out of blood in amber and builds a private island to show them off. The timing is so on the nose I would cut it from a screenplay for being lazy.
Spielberg's movie came out in June 1993. John Hammond, a Scottish billionaire in a white suit, flies in some scientists to bless his park before it opens, and one of them is Laura Dern as Ellie Sattler, a paleobotanist in shorts who shoves her arms elbow deep into a pile of triceratops dung to figure out why the animal is sick. She also gets "Dinosaurs eat man. Woman inherits the earth." Then the fences go down and the lawyer gets eaten off a toilet, which he had coming.
The scene I actually care about is a quiet one. The power's out and everyone's scattered, and Hammond is alone in the empty restaurant eating the ice cream before it melts. Ellie comes in and sits with him. He tells her the first attraction he ever built, after he came down from Scotland, was a flea circus in Petticoat Lane. A tiny trapeze and a tiny carousel, all of it motorized. There were no fleas. People swore they could see them anyway, and this time, he says, he wanted to give them something real. Ellie tells him he never had control, that was the illusion. Then they keep eating the ice cream, because it's melting and it's still good.
That's a museum, honestly, the flea circus. You light a thing in a case and write a label telling people what they're looking at, and they see what you told them to see, and the only real question is whether there was ever a flea. Hammond's park even dresses like one, skeletons posed in a rotunda under a big banner. There's a shot of the park gift shop stacked with lunchboxes and plush dinosaurs, and that was real merch Universal was selling out in the actual theater lobby.
Meanwhile the real T. rex was sitting in a storage room in Rapid City.
In May 1992, a few months before Spielberg started shooting, FBI agents and the National Guard raided the Black Hills Institute and took Sue. Larson had paid Maurice Williams five thousand dollars for her. Williams, a member of the Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe, later said the money was for digging her out and cleaning her, not for buying her. His ranch was also trust land held by the federal government, so he couldn't sell anything off it without permission anyway. The bones went into custody at the South Dakota School of Mines and Technology while everybody sued everybody.
The courts decided Sue belonged to Williams, because Sue was part of the land. Legally, a Tyrannosaurus rex was real estate. A condo with teeth.
Larson ended up doing about eighteen months in federal prison for customs violations, which had nothing to do with Sue, which somehow makes it worse and funnier at the same time? Like they couldn't get him on the dinosaur so they got him on paperwork.
Then, the day before the movie opened, the journal Nature published a paper claiming scientists had pulled DNA out of a weevil trapped in amber that was 120 to 135 million years old. The actual premise of Jurassic Park, out of an actual rock, right on time for the premiere. To get the DNA they had to sacrifice part of the weevil. Nobody has been able to repeat it since. DNA breaks down way too fast to survive that long, and the explanation most scientists land on is that the DNA they read was modern, stray genetic material from the lab or the people handling the sample, nothing that ever came from the bug. That weevil was older than the T. rex. Somebody ground it up, and what they most likely sequenced was the lab.
The book's Hammond isn't the man in the white suit. He's a con artist who landed his investors by showing them a miniature elephant in a cage, and he barely cares about his own grandchildren. At the end he falls down a hill and gets eaten by a swarm of Procompsognathus, little chicken sized dinosaurs the book calls compys. Crichton clearly thought he had it coming.....
....MUCH MORE
Previously from Emma:
"The Plague That Broke English (And Why the Founding Fathers Didn’t Sound British)"
