Word: fossils
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Bill Gates could buy her on a whim. So, for that matter, could Steven Spielberg, Michael Crichton or Madonna. She would make a terrific conversation piece--one of the biggest and most complete fossil skeletons of Tyrannosaurus rex ever found. She's called Sue, and she's for sale to the highest bidder...
...gone on the block in such a high-profile way that her price (not to mention her head) will inevitably go through the roof--and that's a problem for paleontologists, for whom a fossil this good is almost priceless. A nonprofit institution like the (currently Tyrannosaurus-less) Smithsonian, for example, will probably have to scrape up at least $1 million, and possibly more, to get this irreplaceable specimen--which is only partly mineralized and so offers scientists a rare chance to study actual dinosaur-bone tissue. "This will open the floodgates," says Don Wolberg, executive director of special projects...
...wrong place at the wrong time," says Larson, who was released last month. The place was South Dakota's Cheyenne River Sioux reservation, the time 1990. Larson was on a prospecting trip for the Black Hills Institute of Geological Research, a well-respected commercial fossil-supply house he founded in 1974. There's no law against selling fossils, even important ones, as long as they're found on private land, and that's what Larson thought he'd done. The acreage in question belonged to Maurice Williams, a Sioux cattle rancher, and Larson had secured permission in advance...
...turns out that while rancher Williams did own the land, the acreage on which Sue was found had been placed in trust to the U.S. government. Thus he had no right to sell the fossil in the first place--at least not without Department of the Interior approval. And indeed, when the Black Hills Institute sued the government for Sue's return, a federal district court ruled that the original sale was invalid...
...Morrow works as a kind of archaeologist of the living world, digging for meanings as she watches cranes, catches "sundogs" and learns that the saddle-bill stork in the first hieroglyphs represented the soul. Language, she recalls, quoting Emerson, is "a sort of tomb of the Muses... Language is fossil poetry...