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It's not easy rebuilding Sue
Museum readies to assemble its T-Rex
October 23, 1997
Web posted at: 10:16 p.m. EDT (0216 GMT)CHICAGO (CNN) -- It may not take all the king's horses and all the king's men to put the world's most famous T-Rex together again -- but it will take some smart scientists.
The remains of Sue, a 65-million-year-old Tyrannosaurus Rex, have arrived at their final destination, Chicago's Field Museum of Natural History. But her considerable collection of bones arrived in a semi-truck, unassembled.
CNN's Lisa Price reports
2 min., 15 sec. VXtreme streaming video
Now, the task for scientists at Field, which bought the massive skeleton at auction for $8.4 million, is to try to reassemble the bones to show what Sue may have looked like in her heyday.
That's not an inconsiderable task, when you consider that her hip bone alone weighs 200 to 300 pounds. Indeed, rebuilding Sue is expected to take more than two years.
Sue is not only the biggest T-Rex ever recovered, but also the most complete.
Many of the dinosaurs in the world's museums have undergone significant reconstructive surgery, with scientists substituting artificial bones to make up for those missing. But Sue's skeleton, excavated in 1990 from South Dakota's Black Hills, is more than 90 percent original.
And as they view the bones, scientists are unearthing facts about how Sue lived.
"We can see evidence of what happened to her during life," says paleontologist Bill Simpson. "There are healed wounds, bite marks on the skull."
He surmises those must have come from a battle with another T-Rex. After all, says Simpson, "What else could have bitten a T-Rex?"
Sue is thought to have tipped the scales at 16,000 pounds. Though she has been given a usually feminine name, one thing scientists haven't been able to determine for sure is whether Sue is really a she, or a he.
Scientists are also learning facts about how Sue may have died.
"She died in or near a river and was quickly buried, which is wonderful for us because the means the skeleton didn't rot away," says Simpson.
Correspondent Lisa Price contributed to this report.
Related story:
- T-Rex named 'Sue' auctioned for $8.4 million - October 4, 1997
Related sites:
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- Tyrannosaurus - American Museum of Natural History
- Sotheby's - Sue: the Tyrannosaurus Rex
- The Field Museum of Natural History, Chicago
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