20 years and $7.6 Million

So apparently today is the 71st anniversary of the premiere of the Wizard of Oz, thanks google, but as you may have guessed from the title that isn't what this post is about. Today marks the 20th anniversary of the discovery of Sue the Tyrannosaurus rex. Sue may be the most famous example of her species and a lot of that revolves around the long and difficult story it took for her to finally end up at The Field Museum in Chicago, Brian Switek at Dinosaur Tracking has a good summary of the events (here) so I don't feel that I need to rehash them.

What often gets left out of the story is that while yes there was the whole disagreement over where the fossil was found, typically the Black Hills Institute (BHI) is treated as the good guys who got screwed over. While the BHI is better than most it is still in fact a for profit group. So this means that while they do publish a lot on what they find they still do sell to private collections so examples like this whale will not be around for future research. I have discussed this previously so I won't worry about retyping it up here.