✨ Who Owns the Bones?

This past week, we caught the 2014 documentary “Dinosaur 13” which was recently added to Netflix (you can watch the original trailer here). The story revolves around one of the most famous and controversy-laden dinosaurs ever found: Sue the T.Rex.

The doc follows the Black Hills Institute team in South Dakota comprised of hunters, scientists, and true dino-obsessives, as they unearth what would become the most complete Tyrannosaurus and (at the time) the most expensive fossil ever sold.

It gets a bit nuts…

There’s euphoria, then sirens: the federal government raids the lab, the specimen is seized, and a years-long legal brawl unfurls. By the end, the dinosaur nicknamed “Sue” is sold for $8.4M and shipped to Chicago. The credits roll, but the questions don’t…

With the Barosaurus IPO on Rally just a couple of weeks away (opening officially on Wednesday October 22nd), we’re using Shiny Thing$ #205 to take a look at the story behind the film, and question all our assumptions about ownership, expertise, and who really gets to hold the past in their hands.

The Discovery: A Finder’s High

August 1990 - Fossil hunter Susan Hendrikson is prospecting near Faith, South Dakota, when she notices vertebrae weathering out of an eroding bluff. Under the outcrop: a remarkably complete T. rex, roughly 65 million years old. Hendrikson was working with the Black Hills Institute of Geological Research (BHI), run by brothers Peter and Neal Larson. The team pays the local landowner, Maurice Williams, $5,000 - “theropod skeleton” on the check memo - then excavates and moves the specimen to their facility in Hill City. They name the dinosaur “Sue,” in Hendrikson’s honor.

That fall, BHI presents Sue to the scientific community and promises access: a proper monograph, dozens of contributors, researchers welcome. For a moment, it looks like the perfect bridge between commercial collectors and academic paleontology (something that even today is still part of every conversation, as the comments in our most recent instagram post will show)

The Seizure: “Free Sue”

May 1992 - The FBI raids the Black Hills Institute under a federal warrant, seizes the fossil and the papers, and trucks the bones to secure storage at the South Dakota School of Mines & Technology. The legal theory: Sue was taken from land held in trust by the U.S. government; the sale was invalid; the specimen is federal property. Hill City erupts - signs, news cameras, Free Sue. In court, BHI sues for Sue. The defendants span the map: the Department of Justice, the Department of the Interior, the Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe, and the School of Mines. The stage is set for a custody battle over a Cretaceous celebrity.

Who Owns a Dinosaur?

What looks like a property dispute is really a collision of authorities…

• The Institute’s claim: They paid, they excavated, they prepped; they promised access. Ownership and expertise, hand in hand.

• The Government’s claim: The fossil sat on tribal trust land; the land is held by the U.S.; any sale needed federal approval. No approval, no sale.

• The Tribe’s claim: Trust land isn’t a loophole; it’s land with history and law. The object and the ground beneath it are not separable without consent.

• The Landowner’s late claim: The check wasn’t for the fossil; it was for permission to dig. And if it was for the fossil… the price just went up on national TV.

• The Scientific community’s split: Some prominent paleontologists defend BHI’s competence; others condemn the commercialization of unique vertebrate specimens and back the seizure.

Behind the rhetoric sits a quiet, uncomfortable question: when an object straddles science, culture, and market, which “value” gets the final say?

The Ruling—and the Fallout

1994 - U.S. District Judge Richard Battey rules that Sue is “land” (real property) because she was found on trust land; the purported sale violated federal rules governing such land. The five-thousand-dollar check is void; the Institute isn’t the owner. Legally neat. Emotionally nuclear.

Separate from the ownership case, the Department of Justice brings a sweeping indictment against BHI figures: theft, false statements, wire fraud, money laundering, and more. Most charges don’t stick. Peter Larson is ultimately convicted on currency reporting and two misdemeanor collecting violations - nothing directly tied to Sue’s excavation - and serves two years in minimum security. In the court of public opinion, the narrative hardens: the line between science and commerce is policed with real batons.

The Sale: From Prairie to Marble Hall

October 1997 - With title clarified, Maurice Williams secures permission to sell. Bidding at Sotheby’s opens at $500,000; less than ten minutes later, the hammer falls at $8.36 million. The buyer: Chicago’s Field Museum, backed by big-brand patrons (McDonald’s and Disney among them). Relief in the scientific world: Sue won’t vanish into a private salon; she’ll be prepared by experts, studied, and displayed. In 2000, Sue takes a throne in Stanley Field Hall before moving into the museum’s permanent Evolving Planet gallery years later. The specimen is secure. The debate isn’t.

The Bigger Fight: Access vs. Protection

Sue didn’t invent the tension; she put it under lights.

For decades, paleontology has been a patchwork of amateurs, academics, dealers, ranchers, federal land managers, and tribal governments - many values, one fossil record. In the 1980s, commercial fossil companies multiplied, and prices for exceptional vertebrates surged. Museum directors worried about “losing science to the market”; commercial preparators argued they save material from erosion and neglect and often funnel specimens into public institutions. Both are, in different ways, true.

A National Academy committee wrestled with this long before the Sue raid. Their 1987 report tried to harmonize access and stewardship: reduce red tape, allow scientific collecting broadly (permits for quarrying or commercial work), and deposit significant finds in public institutions. The recommendations were largely shrugged off; agency policy stayed inconsistent; “archaeology rules” were often misapplied to paleontology. Confusion grew; conflict followed.

After Sue: Writing the Rules Down

Out of that vacuum came years of legislative attempts, most stalling out. The breakthrough didn’t arrive until 2009, when the Paleontological Resources Preservation Act (PRPA) passed as part of the Omnibus Public Land Management Act. PRPA draws a clear federal line for vertebrate fossils on public lands: permitted collection by qualified researchers for science or education, curation in public repositories, stronger penalties for theft. Casual collecting of common invertebrates and plants remains allowed for personal, non-commercial use. In short: a federal floor. Not a ceiling.

Academic societies cheered. Commercial collectors bristled - arguing public lands had become a “sandbox” for credentialed insiders, while private land remained a wild market. Some scientists wished PRPA reached private land too; others saw eminent domain language as a bridge too far. The common ground? Everyone fears losing important specimens - to erosion, to secrecy, to indifference.

What Sue Really Put on Trial

Call it the Three A’s: Authority, Access, and Assumptions.

→ Authority: Who gets to decide what a fossil is - property, data, heritage, art - and therefore who stewards it? Courts, agencies, tribes, scientists, owners all asserted different, sometimes overlapping claims. Sue made those claims legible (and litigable).

→ Access: Science needs open access and context; markets need clear title; museums need donors and spectacle; communities need respect and participation. The system works only when each value acknowledges the others.

→ Assumptions: “Commercial” doesn’t always mean “anti-science,” and “academic” doesn’t automatically mean “accessible.” Sue shows how brittle those stereotypes can be when the ground truth, both geological and legal, is complicated.

There’s also a subtler lesson about valuation. As scholars of science and markets remind us: price is not the only axis of worth. Fossils are boundary objects - things that different communities use and value differently. Sue forced everyone to say the quiet part out loud: we aren’t just fighting over money; we’re fighting over definitions.

Why This Still Matters (and What We’re Building)

If you collect sneakers, watches, game-worn jerseys, or (soon) a 100-foot sauropod, you already know the dance between scarcity, story, and shared access. The fossil world just got there first and louder. The Sue saga didn’t end with a hammer price; it reshaped how America thinks about deep-time objects and who gets to participate in them.

Our view is simple:

1. Transparency beats mystique. Context is non-negotiable - provenance, preparation, completeness, where the bones sat, who did the work, and what experts think matters as much as the object itself.

2. Public beats private, when possible. The best outcomes put exceptional objects where they can be studied and seen - not just stored.

3. Participation beats spectatorship. If a specimen will eventually live in a major public setting, that doesn’t mean the journey to get it there has to be closed-door. Structured, compliant, retail-first models can align incentives across scientists, owners, and everyday collectors.

That’s the ethos behind how we design offerings - and why the dinosaur work we’re doing emphasizes public display, rigorous documentation, and an exit path that keeps science and spectacle in the same room. We can celebrate the romance and respect the rules. (If you’ve got thoughts on the regulatory maze - or stories from the field - reply to this email. We read every note.)

Walk through Chicago and you can meet Sue - sutures, bite marks, healed fractures, a life written in calcium phosphate. It’s easy to forget the years she spent in locked storage, the court stenography, the shouting. But that history is part of the fossil now. The hall where she stands is the opposite of the hole where she was found, and the distance between them is measured in law, money, and human stubbornness.

Dinosaurs are awesome. The rest is complicated. That’s okay. Anything worth holding for a hundred million years should be hard to hold at all.

Until Next Week...