Hi everyone,

 

Very sorry this is so late for you all, but this week the readings are easier.  They are about dinosaurs.  There are two short readings, so be sure to read both of them.

 

The Story of "Sue"

On a foggy August day in 1990, Susan Hendrickson found a few fossilized dinosaur bones weathering out of a cliff on a ranch near Faith, South Dakota. The ranch belonged to Maurice Williams, who was one-quarter Sioux. Hendrickson's employer, Peter Larson, a founder of the Black Hills Institute of Geological Research at Hill City, South Dakota, was at the time en route to Faith to fix the tires on one of the Institute's vehicles. Hendrickson, driven by a feeling that she would make a great discovery, decided that morning to do some fossil prospecting on the ranch. She could tell at once that the bones visible in the cliff-a few vertebrae and a partial thigh bone-belonged to a large meat-eating dinosaur, almost certainly a Tyrannosaurus rex.
 
The 67-million-year-old Tyrannosaurus rex skeleton known as Sue stands on display at Union Station on June 7, 2000, in Washington, D.C.
By the time she made her way back to camp, Larson had returned. She showed him a few pieces of the find. Larson agreed excitedly that she had found a Tyrannosaurus, and they began making plans to dig the bones out of the ground. They checked to make sure that Williams was indeed the owner of the land where the bones were found, and they obtained his permission to excavate to see how much of the skeleton was there. In a few days, Larson and his crew realized that they were looking at the most complete skeleton of a Tyrannosaurus rex ever discovered. More than 90 percent of the dinosaur's bones were present, including a huge skull nearly five feet long. It was also the largest Tyrannosaurus rex ever found, and its bones were especially well preserved.

Larson negotiated with Williams to buy the skeleton for $5,000 and started work. Within 17 days the skeleton was out of the ground, jacketed, and on its way to the Institute's preparation laboratory. Larson nicknamed the fossil "Sue," after Susan Hendrickson. He had a theory about how one might tell male and female meat-eating dinosaurs apart, and "Sue," he thought, was a large female.

When Williams saw the tremendous publicity the find received, both he and the Sioux tribe began to have second thoughts about the ownership of the bones. The Sioux tribe also felt that they might be legal owners of the fossil, and they asked the U.S. Government to get involved.

In the ensuing legal struggle, the FBI seized "Sue" from the Institute and locked it away at the South Dakota School of Mines and Technology in Rapid City until the dispute could be resolved. They also seized the Institute's financial and fossil-collecting records-and discovered legal irregularities that eventually placed Larson into a minimum-security federal prison for two years.

Larson never got "Sue" back. The government declared Williams the legal owner and returned the fossil to him. Williams soon contacted Sotheby's in New York City to auction the skeleton. On October 4, 1997, after a huge publicity campaign, "Sue" was sold for a mind-boggling $8.36 million to the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago, which received corporate backing from Walt Disney World Resort and McDonald's Corporation.

The Field Museum became responsible for preparing "Sue" for public display. Head fossil preparator Bill Simpson and his team worked the bones out of the matrix, and Phil Fraley designed the mount to hold them. Paleontologist Christopher Brochu was hired to write up "Sue's" scientific description. The skull, crushed and flattened when the dinosaur was buried 67 million years ago, was CT-scanned to reveal its internal structure. Too heavy to mount with the rest of the dinosaur, the skull was replaced on the skeleton by a lightweight cast with the crushing straightened out. On May 17, 2000, "Sue" went on permanent public display in Chicago. The real skull was displayed nearby.

Feathered Dinosaurs from Liaoning

In 1994, farmers in Liaoning Province in northeastern China began finding exquisitely preserved fossil birds representing a new species, Confuciusornis. They were discovered in fine-grained Early Cretaceous sedimentary deposits near the village of Sihetun. Many were so well preserved that even their feathers could be seen. Several kinds of fossil birds were found, but Confuciousornis was the most common. Other fossils were also found, including splendid examples of fish and plants. So many fossils were found, and are still being found, that a thriving market has developed in exporting them out of China-a market that the Chinese government considers illegal smuggling.

In 1996, the skeleton of a small dinosaur came to light at Sihetun. Complete practically to the last bone, it belonged to a new kind of theropod about three feet long named Sinosauropteryx prima. In size and anatomy, it closely resembled the small European dinosaur Compsognathus, but it showed distinct traces of short, brushy structures along the neck, back, and tail. After some arguing back and forth, most scientists now believe that the brushy structures are indeed feathers, somewhat different in structure than those of modern birds. Sinosauropteryx is thus the first feathered non-avian dinosaur ever found.

Even as Sinosauropteryx was being studied, more feathered dinosaurs turned up in Liaoning: Protarchaeopteryx, a larger theropod five feet long, with very birdlike feathers visible along the tail; Caudipteryx, a very birdlike theropod about three feet tall, showing good feather impressions along forelimbs and tail; Sinornithosaurus, a troodontid-like theropod about the same size as Sinosauropteryx, with hairlike feathers; and Beipiaosaurus, a theropod more than six feet long, the largest-known theropod with feather impressions (also hairlike). The smallest feathered Liaoning theropod was Microraptor, less than 1.5 feet long, classified as a dromaeosaurid. All these feathered dinosaurs had relatively large, powerful hind legs, obviously suited for fast running, and hands with large claws. None had wings.

The discovery of feathered theropods strongly supports the theory that birds are theropod dinosaurs that evolved the ability to fly. But perhaps the most interesting thing about the Liaoning feathered theropods is that they represent several different theropod families. This means that the origin of feathers is not closely linked to the origin of birds, and offers evidence that many different lines of theropod dinosaurs may have had feathers of some sort, not just those most closely related to birds. Depending on how widespread the structures were among theropods, even such giants as Tyrannosaurus rex may have had feathers.