At 90% complete, Sue is the largest, most intact and best-preserved Tyrannosaurus rex ever found. The Chicago Field Museum, after using an industrial CAT scan to examine the fossil, purchased Sue for $8.6 million at auction. Once the bones were painstakingly removed from their stone overcoat, each was cast in plastic. The fossil itself was assembled for exhibit in Chicago, and exact, full-size replicas of the nearly complete fossilized skeleton were created to tour around the United States and the world. One of them has been on display at the Montshire Museum in Norwich all summer.
A visit from Sue first requires an on-sight inspection by a specialist from the Field Museum to make sure it will fit into the allotted exhibit space. Sue is snug in the Montshire, filling up much of the ground floor and rising almost to the second floor railing. Sue weighs 3,000 pounds, is 42-feet long, stands 13-feet high at the hip, and requires the delicate touch of a 12-foot long feather duster to banish cobwebs.
Sue may or may not actually be a female - the name is in honor of Sue Hendrickson, the woman paleontologist who found the fossil - but the idea has some scientific credibility. And Sue is unquestionably the finest, most precise physical record of T. rex yet discovered on the planet.
Accompanying Sue’s awesome presence is an entertaining series of interactive exhibits that demonstrate how T. rex functioned; how its wimpy forelimbs rotated outward, but not inward; how its forward-facing eyes enabled depth perception; how tiny muscles opened the enormous jaws - and huge muscles closed them (a characteristic familiar to anyone who’s ever tried to wrestle an alligator).
Beginning on September 8, Sue comes down. A specialist from Chicago will return to the Montshire, which will close for three days while seven people dismantle the exhibit.
It’s a job requiring several fork lifts and foam packing crates: one each for the head and rib cage, three for the tail, and two for each hind leg. And then she’ll be gone, on her way to enthrall another crowd at another museum, perhaps in another country.
I grew up watching the 1933-version of King Kong . About halfway through the movie, Kong fights a T. rex that attacks standing straight up like George Foreman circa 1998. In the eighty years since the movie was made, discoveries like Sue have helped paleontologists understand that a Tyrannosaur was a horizontal beast; its huge tail a perfect counter balance to its ample neck and oversized head.
This summer, as I stood gazing up at Sue’s massive jaw and wicked-looking teeth, I could well imagine that when a Tyrannosaur charged, even Diplodocus or rhinoceros-like Triceratops, must been all but frozen with fear.
