The Day that changed Archaelology forever.

    On October 4, 1997, the museum world converged upon the Sotheby's auction house in New York City to bud on a most unusual object-a dinosaur skeleton. But this was no ordinary dinosaur skeleton(though to be fair, dinosaur skeletons aren't exactly ordinary things to begin with). No, this specimen was the most intact fossil of Tyrannosaurus Rex ever found. And it was about to change the world of archaeology forever.

     After being discovered in the Badlands in 1990, this particular skeleton was cleaned, examined, and preserved for several years, until the time came for the specimen to be transferred. There were several different parties interested in acquiring this skeleton, which by this point was named Sue after the rancher who had discovered the skeleton. And so, the auction began.  As the bidders rolled into Sotheby's, they were handed this program:

     Several museums had stated their interest in acquiring Sue, but one institution that had hidden any speculation was the Field Museum, from right here in Chicago.  The bidding started.  Bids were put out on behalf of museums in North Carolina, South Dakota, and even a cultural center in Florida.  But there was one other museum that truly craved the skeleton: the Smithsonian.  Eventually, it became a bidding war between the North Carolina museum, the Floridian cultural center, and a private bidder serving as proxy for an anonymous bidder(the Field Museum).  The North Carolina museum stopped bidding.  Then the Floridians bowed out.  And then finally, the private bidder had won the T-Rex for the whopping price of $8.3 Million, which was quickly revealed to be from the coffers of the Field.  This auction changed the landscape of archaeology forever.  All of a sudden fossil-hunting out west became the late-20th Century answer to 49ers panning for gold.

     As for Sue and her new home, she went on display at the Field Museum of Natural History in 2000, and has held court for more than 21 Million visitors over the past 13 years.  As bold as it might have been, the Field's win-at-all-costs attitude over Sue proved to be a dark harbinger of the future, as by 2013 the museum was facing massive budget deficits due to rampant expansion and acquisitions without commensurate fundraising, a trend which in many ways was kicked off by the 1997 bidding war over Sue.