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Strategies & Market Trends : Piffer OT - And Other Assorted Nuts -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Jorj X Mckie who wrote (34091)	5/17/2000 3:57:00 PM
From: Neenny	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 63513

Anybody heading to Chicago???? Looks like a great trip for the kids... Millions of Years and Millions of Dollars Later, T. Rex Unveiled By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS CHICAGO -- Sixty-five million years after she stalked the Earth, a Tyrannosaurus rex named Sue was on her feet again, crouched with her tail stretched out behind her. Hundreds of children and onlookers who packed into the main hall of the Field Museum of Natural History stared in awe today as a curtain dropped to reveal the largest, most complete and best-preserved T. rex skeleton ever discovered. In the background, a chamber orchestra played the specially commissioned "Tyrannosaurus Sue: A Cretaceous Concerto." "It was a grand entrance," said Chicago Mayor Richard Daley. The 41-foot-long skeleton -- named for Sue Hendrickson, the fossil hunter who found it in 1990 -- is one of the most talked about and debated fossil finds in history. Sue cost the museum $8.36 million at an auction that had been delayed for years by a legal battle with the federal government, the Sioux Indian tribe and a rancher all claiming ownership. Federal agents seized the bones in 1992, claiming the fossil hunters failed to get a federal permit to dig for them on the rancher's land located inside the Cheyenne River Indian Reservation. After a $7 million investigation, the government found no crime, but it prosecuted Hendrick's partner Peter Larson on currency violation charges involving overseas fossil sales. A court eventually declared the rancher the fossil's rightful owner, and Sue was put up for auction in 1997. After a 10-minute bidding frenzy, the Field Museum bought it for $8.36 million, criticized as an outrageous sum. To cover Sue's cost, the Field took on McDonald's and Disney as partners. Both get exclusive rights to casts of Sue's bones. "Sue has waited for this for a long time," said Hendrickson, who spoke before the unveiling and held a question-and-answer session with about 150 school children. By any measure, the skeleton is big -- 13 feet tall at the hips, 41 feet long and teeth as long as a human forearm. The museum is displaying "her" (scientists cannot say for sure whether Sue was male or female) in the main hall. The one-ton skull, too heavy to be mounted with the rest of the skeleton, is displayed in a case nearby. A lightweight cast replaces it on the skeleton. "I thought it was going to be bigger, but it is very complete," said Jared Dickerson, a seventh-grader who won a trivia contest to get an invitation to the unveiling. "The coolest thing is knowing how fast and big it was. And I heard it could eat a whole human in two bites." The Sue exhibit explodes a few dinosaur myths along the way. For example, it explains that an examination of Sue's skull with an industrial CT scanner yielded the theory that the T. rex's olfactory bulbs -- which control the sense of smell -- were each bigger than the cerebrum, the thinking part of the brain. "Remember the scene in 'Jurassic Park' with the T. rex?" asked the exhibit's assistant developer, Becky Margolin. "When Sam Neill was telling the kids if you don't move, it can't see you? The thing we can now theorize is that he definitely would have smelled them and would have eaten them anyway."