You Old Fossil, You

I often sift through my collection of fossils.

They are a mixed bunch of stones that I picked up over many a family holiday,  walks on a beach or prised out of muddy ground whether the accessible part of a cliff or a railway cutting.

The thrill of every single discovery remains strong and vivid in my mind. I will have been scraping and poking around for hours with grubby and bruised fingers or a ragged piece of wood, turfing out what may originally have looked to be an exciting object only to be disappointed as it turned out to be just a pebble or an interestingly shaped fragment of rock.

Very rarely but ultimately rewarding was the exposing of a devils toe nail, a coiled ammonite, a bullet shaped belemite and the occasional shark's tooth.

These items, rinsed out in the nearest  rock pool or puddle have been amongst my most prized possessions.

Ironically for all of my physical effort to excavate them, the accumulated cost of transport over a number of years and associated storage they have no real tangible value.

That is in direct contrast to the sale at auction in 1997 of a fossil that to date represents the world record paid for such a thing.

Granted, the fossil is quite a specimen and nothing like my small-fry collectables. It is one of the most complete, articulated skeletons of any of the Cretaceous Period Dinosaurs and arguably the most fear engendering and iconic- a Tyranosaurus Rex.

It was originally discovered by fossil hunters in 1990 amongst the sedimentary rocks of the Hall Creek Formation of the South Dakota Badlands in the United States.

That area has for decades been a rich source of fossils with the arid dry soils releasing their fossilised treasures with quite regular frequency after periodic rains and surface water floods.

The first hint of something truly significant at that time was the protruding of a few bones out of the strata of a low bluff or slope.

Over the following 17 days of painstaking excavation and cataloguing the site produced some 90% of the skeleton of a T-Rex some 42 feet in length and weighing around 6 tons.

Critically the skull about 5 feet long and an even rarer find in such situations, was tucked up inside the pelvic cavity giving rise to speculation that the dinosaur had suffered an accident, possibly having been drowned in a flash flood between 66 and 67 million years ago whilst otherwise appearing to have been in its prime of life in terms of physical condition , strength and ability to thrive as a very efficient predator in that prehistoric environment.

This was borne out by the jaw bone which retained many original and still razor sharp teeth.

The unprecedented discovery was broadcast across the globe and attracted considerable scientific and public interest.

Unfortunately the announcement alerted the US Government and South Dakota State Authorities to potentially exploitative actions of professional fossil hunters in what could be a very lucrative line of work.

The National Guard were mobilised on the instruction of the Federal Government to seize the skeletal remains and it was removed to a safe storage facility. This was to the shock and annoyance of those who had unearthed the T Rex and also the local community who had hoped that it would, as the main feature, kick start a long planned Museum and Institute as a tourist attraction and centre for Paleontological Research in an area of otherwise sparse opportunities.

Others put in claims of ownership and in a long running Legal Action over the following 7 years it was eventually ruled that the T Rex belonged to the Landowner of the Hall Creek site, a Native American and descendant of the Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe.

At a high profile auction at Sothebys in New York in 1997 the successful bid of $7.6 million dollars plus costs taking it to around $8.3 million saw the dinosaur heading for the Field Institute in Chicago. The huge price had been funded through the generous donations to the Museum of the likes of the Disney and McDonalds Corporations.

In spite of the acrimony and bitterness of the law case this was perhaps the best outcome for the preservation and further study of such a unique specimen although the experience for those involved in its discovery and excavation was far from ideal. One of the professional fossil hunters actually served a custodial sentence for what was clearly intended to be a demonstration of intention by the Authorities to crack down on any illegal activity involving fossils and fossilised remains.

The T Rex, named Sue after its original finder is to this day considered by The Field Museum to have been a most prudent purchase.