Sue, 65 Million Years Old, On Block Sotheby’s Makes No Bones About Excitement Over Nearly Complete T-Rex

Forget the Picassos, Van Goghs or Jackie O’s high-class garage sale. Auctioneers have something REALLY big to put on the block now - a 65-million-year-old antique expected to sell for more than $1 million.

The 50-foot-long fossil skeleton of a Tyrannosaurus rex named Sue, slated for sale at Sotheby’s this week, drew potential buyers and plain old curiosity seekers Saturday eager for a look.

“This dinosaur is a world treasure, something so irreplaceable,” said David Redden, executive vice president of Sotheby’s.

“We have never sold anything of this importance, and nobody else has either.”

Sue appears to have been an exceptionally scrappy T-rex. Virtually complete, her skeleton includes a tooth fragment from a rival T-rex embedded in a rib, and a gouge on the side of her skull, a wound that may have caused her death.

Her lower left jaw is crushed, and she suffered a broken leg.

It took Sotheby’s more than eight hours to transport the skeleton 38 blocks from a warehouse to its main showroom on Manhattan’s East Side.

“She’s more fragile than the most fragile piece of glass,” Redden said, showing off the T-rex set on a blue foam bed. “This is the most complete of any T-rex yet recovered.”

Sue’s new owners have a giant reconstruction job facing them.

Most of her more than 400 bones are carefully packed in field boxes, wrapped in plaster casts.

The head, the size of two clothes dryers, requires a cleaning, encrusted with rock and sediment.

Sotheby’s has auctioned yachts, homes and estates, but never anything in their main showroom of Sue’s magnitude, Redden said, adding that most T-rex skeletons are only 40 to 50 percent complete.

The female T-rex was discovered in 1990 by Sue Hendrickson, who was walking on a Cheyenne River Reservation ranch in South Dakota, owned by Maurice Williams.

Sotheby’s is selling the fossil on behalf of Williams, a Sioux Indian. But proceeds will be held in a trust by the federal government, which has claimed the dinosaur because it was found on land under federal jurisdiction.

The government seized the skeleton in 1992 from Peter L. Larson, the commercial fossil dealer who excavated it, saying Larson lacked special permits needed for such an excavation.

Larson subsequently was convicted on charges unrelated to Sue’s excavation, including failure to declare money to customs agents and stealing fossils from sites in Montana and South Dakota. He ended a two-year sentence at a federal prison camp this summer.

Dozens of serious potential bidders have contacted Sotheby’s, Redden said, declining to identify them.

One of Sue’s biggest suitors is Rapid City, S.D., businessman Stanford Adelstein, who last week said he wants to bring the bones home to the Black Hills Institute of Geological Research, which Larson heads.

“We want to ensure that the fossil is made available to scientists all around the world, to the general public and especially to our children and grandchildren who are so eager to learn about dinosaurs,” Adelstein said.

If an American institution makes the winning bid, it will have the opportunity to pay for Sue interest-free over the next three years, terms offered by Williams and the U.S. government through Sotheby’s.