Bones of contention

Whenever he is in Chicago, South Dakota businessman Peter Larson finds time to go stare from afar upon the love of his life, a putative female who left him in the lurch a decade ago, breaking his heart, his bank account and sending him to prison.

Larson, 50, has the rugged, weatherbeaten look of a cowboy both in dress and demeanor, but the genial sparkle in his deeply lined, searching eyes reveals a forgiving spirit.

This is the perfect place for her,” Larson said as he looked affectionately upon his lost love during a recent visit to the Field Museum. “She belongs in a place like the Field.”

The business Larson and his brother, Neal, are in is prospecting for dinosaur fossils, then preparing and mounting the bones for display.

The object of his affection at the Field was Sue, the Tyrannosaurus rex fossil his business owned for two years after one of his prospectors, Susan Hendrickson, found it on what he thought was the private land of a South Dakota rancher in 1990.

Who owned the land became the question of a bitter federal court case, however, one that traces its origins to a long-standing battle between academic paleontologists and commercial bone hunters like the Larsons.

Peter Larson and his ex-wife, Kristin Donnan, talked about the triumph and travail that has engulfed the famous fossil when they were in town publicizing the book they have co-authored, “Rex Appeal” (Invisible Cities Press, $26.95).

The Larsons’ company, the Black Hills Institute, in Hill City, S.D., is renowned as one of the three most skilled fossil preparation laboratories in the world.

Before 1990, there were only 12 T. rex specimens known to science, none with more than 45 percent of its bones. Since 1990, 24 more have been found. Black Hills Institute prospectors found seven of them, including the two most complete skeletons ever.

You would think with a record like that, the Larsons would be paleontological stars.

Because they sell fossils for profit, however, the mild-mannered brothers are among the science’s most controversial figures. In many sanctums of academic paleontology, Larson is viewed as a scientific heretic.

With 85 percent of her bones intact, Sue turned out to be a fossil of unprecedented magnitude, her bones representing an immense font of new scientific knowledge about her species and the world she lived in 67 million years ago.

“Finding her was like the fulfillment of the dream probably held by every paleontologist who ever lived,” Larson said.

The Larsons’ business already was well known as a commercial supplier of first-rate fossils to prestigious museums, including the Field Museum, and to wealthy private collectors.

The Larsons had no intention of putting Sue up for sale, however. As the most spectacular dinosaur fossil ever found, Sue (named after Hendrickson) was to be the centerpiece of a non-profit museum the brothers had been dreaming of building since they were kids.

The dinosaur museum was supposed to be a way of drawing Black Hills tourist dollars to their tiny, none-too-prosperous hometown, Hill City (population 780). When they announced they had donated Sue to their newly incorporated museum in early 1992, the Larsons were local heroes.

Elsewhere, however, as the fossil’s scientific value and potential monetary worth came into sharper focus, the Larsons were being painted as villains.

The Sioux Indian rancher on whose land they found Sue, who had gladly accepted the $5,000 the Larsons gave him in a handshake deal, got a lawyer and claimed the fossil was his. The Cheyenne River Sioux Indian Reservation, of which the rancher’s land is a part, filed suit claiming the fossil belonged to the tribe.

The reservation land issue struck a chord with federal authorities who for years had been trying to stiffen enforcement and penalties for poaching fossils from federal lands. Those authorities, and the professional paleontological societies that were advising them, were eager for a high-profile case to set the tone for tougher enforcement standards.

Kevin Schieffer, the young, ambitious acting U.S. attorney in nearby Rapid City, thought he could make a case against the Larsons for theft of federal property from the rancher, the reservation and the government.

The government seemed intent on using the case to send a message that unauthorized fossil hunting on public lands was a serious crime. If so, the message probably was lost in widespread public sympathy for the Larsons in South Dakota, where many saw their trial as an abuse of prosecutorial power.

By the time the government took the Larsons to trial in 1995, theft charges relating to Sue had been dropped. There was no case.

Instead, the government came up with 153 new felony and misdemeanor charges, ranging from conspiracy, money laundering and theft, to buying illegally collected fossils from others.

Digging for evidence

In three years of preparing the new case against the Larsons, the government mined the Black Hills Institute filing cabinets for records of other transactions. Spending millions of dollars, prosecutors questioned the institute’s old customers and suppliers and spent months visiting and mapping old institute excavation sites all over the West to determine if they were on public or private land.

It all had a chilling effect on the institute’s business, Larson said, as loyal customers quit calling and new business fell to a trickle, while the Larsons amassed legal expenses that eventually topped $800,000.

Six-week trial

The six-week trial was one of the longest in the state’s history. Juror interviews after the trial finished revealed 11 of the jurors were ready to acquit the defendants on all charges, but one adamantly thought the Larsons were guilty of something.

Facing a mistrial, the 11 compromised with the lone holdout. They convicted Neal Larson of a single misdemeanor. They found the institute guilty of buying a catfish fossil that a freelance prospector may have mined from federal property.

Peter Larson was guilty of a misdemeanor and two minor felony charges: He failed to report on a customs form some travelers checks he brought back from a trip to Japan, and he failed to declare $15,000 in expense money he took to a dig site to Peru. He was sentenced to two years in prison.

Though the government said it had seized Sue’s bones to stop the Larsons from selling them to the highest bidder, its action ultimately paved the way for the fossil to go to public auction.

When a federal court declared him to be the owner, the rancher on whose land Sue was found called in Sotheby’s and put the fossil up for auction, expecting it to fetch about $1 million.

Sue was sold Oct. 27, 1997, three weeks before Larson was released from prison in Colorado. The Field Museum’s winning bid was for $8.36 million.

The price set a world record that was almost unbelievable, considering that one of the previous fossil price records had been $350,000 paid to the Larsons for a group of duck-billed dinosaurs they had collected and prepared.

Paleontologists everywhere, including Larson, were relieved that Sue stayed in the U.S. and, rather than going to a private collector, she went to a prestigious museum where she would forever be in the service of scientific research and public education.

The extraordinary price paid for Sue, however, ended up causing some problems for paleontology.

Thieves, for one thing, began looking upon fossils as newfound gold, and scientific dig sites increasingly have been looted of bones in the dead of night, to be sold to wealthy private collectors. Such crimes rob science both of the bones and the critical contextual information scientists gather by studying the fossils while they are still in the ground.

Ranchers and others who own fossil-rich private land also began asking scientists for fees upfront to search for fossils, and are demanding more money for found fossils. For academic paleontologists, whose field work is often funded by very modest grants, these costs can be prohibitive.

“Who could blame ranchers for wanting to get something from their land if it contains rare fossils?” Larson said.

“We did have a period shortly after the Sue auction when we saw a lot of dinosaur dreamers, people thinking of making their fortunes by finding and selling fossils for millions. But that has died down.

“Fossil prices haven’t gone back down to the pre-Sue prices, but it has come back into being a much more reasonable situation,” he said.

Though Sue cost him two years of his life and an estimated $1 million in expenses and legal fees, Larson said she also made his business more famous — and busier — than ever.

“The bad news is that people have to pay more to look for fossils now,” he said. “The good news is that there are a lot more people out there looking for them.”

The Larsons don’t have Sue, but in 1992, they found Stan, another spectacular specimen, 65 percent complete so far. He has become the centerpiece Sue was meant to be for the Hill City dinosaur museum the brothers finally are building.

“We’re still finding Stan’s bones,” Larson said, “so who knows? He may still vie for the title with Sue.”

Though he has only a bachelor’s degree in geology, the scientific papers Larson writes reporting his finds are published in the best scientific journals. Giants of paleontology such as Robert Bakker and Jack Horner testify to his excellent work.

Still, Larson finds himself at loggerheads with academics he calls “The Establishment,” the PhD’s who reign over the prestigious Society of Vertebrate Paleontology and view commercial dealers like the Larsons as a danger to science.

Federal property?

Many foreign countries regard fossils found within their borders as state property and do not allow them to be sold or exported. It is a position the paleontology society would like the U.S., with its unusually rich fossil deposits, would adopt.

“It would be unconscionable for our society to not preserve things of value to our heritage as a part of our public record,” said Richard Stucky, the immediate past president of the group.

The society, he said, recognizes that specimens coming from private lands are owned by the landowner and can be sold or donated as the owner sees fit.

Many of the most fossil-rich formations in the world, however, are in the half-billion acres of public, federally owned land in the American West.

Stucky has been one of the chief lobbyists for federal bills introduced to the U.S. House and Senate that bolster existing laws prohibiting any but authorized scientists to excavate rare fossils on public lands, introducing severe penalties as deterrence.

A recent study of fossil sites in the Badlands area of South Dakota showed that 40 percent of the sites had been pillaged, according to a recent paleontology society report.

“Preserving this material is of paramount importance,” Stucky said. “You’ll find many of us are very emotional about this. It is so very important to have these fossils to contribute to our knowledge of life on Earth. It is the only record we have of it, and it should not just go to someone who found it first.”

Fossils are found when wind, rain and erosion gradually peel away the rock they are embedded in, a process that is known as “weathering out.”

If nobody is there to find the fossils, they gradually crumble to dust.

Academic paleontologists say few big, rare fossils are lost to weathering because they search known dinosaur sites on public lands on a regular basis.

Larson refutes this and campaigns against the proposed legislation, arguing that a great deal of material is lost because there is simply too much land for the academics to monitor.

“On public lands,” he said, “we don’t see 100th of one percent of the fossils that are destroyed by weathering. It’s there; it spends its time in the sun; and it is gone.

“Amateurs are the ones who make most new finds. Only one T. rex was ever found by an academic, the rest were found by amateur and commercial collectors. Allosaurs, brachiosaurs — most of them were found by regular people. The more eyes that are out there looking, the more fossils will be found and preserved.”

Originally Published: January 21, 2003 at 1:00 AM CST