Dinosaur 13
You go out in the field,
and you look up in the sky,
and you see the stars,
and some of that light
that's coming down to your eye
has been traveling
for millions of years.
So you look up, and you're
looking at the past,
and then you look down,
and you're looking at the past.
You know, those dinosaur bones
are, like,
millions of years old,
and that light left there maybe
at the same time that you're looking...
it's just you're kind of
sandwiched in that world,
and it's really...
really a wonderful place
being out in the field.
It was a brilliant story,
I mean, if you
didn't have to live it
like the Larsons did.
It's a good American tale.
Unfortunately,
it had a bad ending
for a couple real
brilliant paleontologists.
What does that
white line mean, Susan?
We'd been digging
at the Ruth Mason Quarry
since 1979.
The 1990 season,
I think we were
into the third month.
We'd been working north...
actually not working at
the quarry itself anymore.
We were actually prospecting
and looking for fossils.
We were looking for fossils
on Sharky Williams'
and his brother
Maurice Williams' ranch
and finding
some pretty cool stuff,
and we get up on August 12,
look outside the tent,
and it's foggy.
It's kind of a weird thing
to have fog on the prairie.
So we got kind of
We weren't in any big hurry,
because you couldn't see
very well,
and then went out to start
loading up the Suburban.
We have a 1975 Suburban
all rusted out.
And I look,
and the tire's flat.
So I say, "Oh, crap."
Well, almost flat.
Still had a little bit
of air in it.
So I go in the back
to get the spare tire,
and the spare tire's flat,
so I pull out the tire pump,
and the tire pump hose
is broken.
So we figure,
"I guess we better...
we better head in to town
while we still have
enough air in the tire
to get there."
We decided, well,
we're gonna have to go to town.
I'd been out there
for four of five weeks.
Going to town, that's okay.
I can take it easy
for half an hour,
an hour. That's fine with me,
but of course, Susan,
Susan just can't handle that.
You know, that's a waste
of time, right?
There was the flat tire.
I was like, "Great.
You guys go to town
and don't need me.
I've got this place
I want to look at."
Out there, you need landmarks
to find your way around,
and I said,
"Okay, it's foggy.
You can't see.
Make sure you don't walk
in a circle."
And, like, two hours later, I
was right back where I started,
I just couldn't believe it,
'cause I was, like,
trying so hard to walk straight.
It was like...
I felt really stupid.
Believe it was the next day
we went back
with the video camera
and just kind of reenacted,
you know, how I found her.
Anybody who had any idea
what a fossil versus a rock was
would have seen it,
'cause there was
a lot of broken bones
dribbling down.
About eight foot
up the side of the cliff,
there were
three articulated vertebrae
From the debris pile,
I picked up scraps
that showed the hollowness
and took it with,
'cause I knew if I went back
to where they were working,
they wouldn't believe me.
We got back after
fixing the tire,
and we were at the dig site.
We were just finishing
up doing stuff,
And she opens her hand,
and she's got two pretty
small pieces of bone,
only about this big,
in her hand.
And I'd never seen the inside
of a T. Rex vertebra before,
but I knew exactly that was
what she had in her hand,
and I says,
"Is there more of it?"
She said, "There's a lot more."
So we ran, literally ran
back to the site.
Crawl up on the cliff face,
and I see three
articulated vertebrae,
and from that point on,
I'm absolutely certain
this is going to be
the best thing we ever found
and it's going to be
a complete T. Rex.
He called up and said,
"Neal, I need you to bring
a lot of plaster two-by-fours."
Well, it took me a day
to get everything ready,
and I came up, and I got up
there with all these materials,
and he took me
over to this big cliff,
and he said, "Take a look."
And I looked at it,
and I looked at him.
I said, "Is that T. Rex?"
He said, "Yes,
and I think it's all here."
And we haven't started digging
or haven't moved
anything around yet.
We've just been looking at
it and taking some pictures
how to proceed.
There's a real mass
of bones here.
Some are caught up
in concretion,
but most appear to be really
excellently preserved.
And I believe that the
tail's going that way
and the skull is going this way,
but we're just going to
have to dig it up and see.
Collecting fossils
is something that's very timely.
Fossils are discovered because
they're weathering out,
because the forces of nature,
rain, winds, freezing,
thawing, even snowfall,
have an effect on that fossil.
Every day that it's outside
is a day that it's
going to destruction.
all these thousands
of fragments of bones
and bagging them, labeling them.
Well, the plan of attack
is to protect the
specimen first of all,
and then you go above the
specimen and dig down to it
so that you can get
all the way around it
to remove it from the cliff.
We basically used
these ditch-digging tools,
picks and shovels,
to dig down that 30 feet
from where I thought
we could get back
into the cliff face
far enough to uncover
what I thought
would be the limits
of that skeleton.
Probably the hardest work
I've ever had to do in my life.
We were doing this all
in temperatures around
It was very hard work,
but it was very easy
to put in a lot
of energy into it,
because we all wanted to see
what the skeleton
was going to look like.
Basically, we'd take
different sections
so we weren't
in each other's way
and just kind of worked
the specimen
until we could start
removing bones.
You know, and every time
somebody found a bone
or fragments,
they just said, "the S bone."
We wouldn't say, "Skull."
We didn't want to jinx it.
Pretty early on,
I hit something hard, and so,
I stopped.
"It's the 'S' word," I said,
thinking,
"I bet I hit the skull."
When I got down digging
and then started really working
with the smaller knife,
we found, as we were going down,
is the back of the skull.
And we're getting down,
and here's this skull
taking shape,
and we get out on the side,
and I put Terry to work
on cleaning
the side of the skull,
'cause he's really
our best preparator.
Pete let me work
on part of the skull
in the field,
which was amazing.
He's working and uncovering
the teeth one by one by one.
It was spectacular.
Teeth like this
just sticking
right out of the skull.
We're going, "Oh, my God.
Look at this thing.
Look how huge it is.
This has gotta be
bigger than the one
at the American Museum.
It's huge. It's wonderful."
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