WHO OWNS THE BONES?

By MICHAEL D. LEMONICK

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.

No one knows what will happen, of course, when Sue goes up for auction at Sotheby's in New York City this Saturday. She may well end up in a natural history museum, rather than as a lawn ornament of the rich and famous.

But Sue has 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 at the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia. "I think it's criminal to auction something like this."

This isn't the first time the word criminal has come up in reference to Sue. In fact, her history since discovery has been a twisted tale of lawsuits, FBI raids, felony prosecutions and one of the longest criminal trials in South Dakota history--culminating in an 18-month jail sentence for Peter Larson, the man who dug Sue out of a hillside in the state.

"I was in the 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 to go digging on his land.

The person who actually found the dinosaur was Susan Hendrickson, then Larson's girlfriend. After 17 days of excavating, they had what would turn out to be the most pristine T. rex specimen ever found. Larson named the monster (which he thinks might even be female) Sue, in honor of her discoverer.

Larson then wrote Williams a check for $5,000 and shipped the bones to institute headquarters in Hill City, S.D., where he planned to catalog, prepare, mount and display the magnificent skeleton. Larson started giving public lectures and publishing popular articles on Sue. Tourists began streaming in.

Then, in May 1992, a different kind of visitor arrived: FBI agents and National Guard troops, among others, raided the Black Hills Institute, seizing Sue and other fossils, along with photos, business records and documents. In 1993 a federal grand jury indicted Larson and five colleagues on a total of 39 felony charges, including stealing fossils from government land.

It 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.

Meanwhile, after a seven-week trial and two weeks of deliberation, a jury convicted Larson on only two felonies--failing to report $31,700 in travelers' checks to U.S. Customs when he returned from Japan, and failing to report $15,000 in cash that he and a friend took on a trip to Peru. He was also convicted of two misdemeanors: illegally taking a fossil worth less than $100 from federal land and illegally retaining another small fossil. On his Bureau of Prisons admission form, Larson's offense was listed as "failure to fill out forms."

Who won the case? That depends on whom you ask. Assistant U.S. Attorney Robert Mandel is convinced the penalty would have been more severe if local press coverage hadn't tainted his case. The defense, predictably, thinks it won by persuading the jury that its client was the victim of academics trying to drive commercial fossil hunters out of business.

Wherever the truth lies, Sue ended up back in Williams' hands, and the government not only gave him permission to sell but urged him to go the auction route. Why? "It was hard to set a fixed price and hard to know a fair price," says Sotheby's executive vice president David Redden, who is in charge of the sale.

The $1 million-plus that Sue is expected to draw will undoubtedly seem fair to Williams, although scientists like the Academy of Natural Sciences' Wolberg fear it will send the costs of acquiring important fossils out of sight. In fact, another T. rex, known as Mr. Z Rex, is on the market for a staggering $12 million. The owners, says Jim Wyatt, a fossil dealer who is acting as broker, "based that price on the excitement generated by T. rexes and dinosaurs in general over the past few years."

Things may be getting a little too exciting out in the field. Two weeks ago, FBI agents thwarted Montana ranchers who were going after a T. rex skeleton with a tractor, presumably to remove it from federal land and sell it on the open market. And the public's hunger for fossils isn't limited to dinosaurs. Wyatt recently brokered the sale, for $2,400, of some bits of fossilized Cro-Magnon man advertised over his fossilnet.com Website--a sale that was condemned by anthropologists.

Ironically, the Black Hills Institute may yet get its bones back. Larson's organization has kept its hand in the game by contributing material to the auction catalog and advising Sotheby's on how to care for the fossils. Thanks to a wealthy benefactor named Stanford Adelstein, the institute will make a serious bid on Sue this week. And it's no secret how South Dakotans feel about the prospect of bringing their T. rex home. Said Governor William Janklow in a statement released by the institute: "She belongs in South Dakota. She lived and died here, and we want her back."

--Reported by David Bjerklie and Andrea Dorfman/New York and Patrick Dawson/Billings

With reporting by DAVID BJERKLIE AND ANDREA DORFMAN/NEW YORK AND PATRICK DAWSON/BILLINGS