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

a little bit later start.

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,

and I could not believe it.

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

and a couple other pieces

of bones sticking out.

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 Susan comes up.

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

and trying to figure out

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.

We started by picking up

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

115 degrees every day.

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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