Waiting in the Ground to be Found

For Sue Hendrickson, the Dinosaur Was Just the Beginning
by Rachel Louise Snyder

I met Sue Hendrickson for the first time several years ago at a seaside restaurant on a dreary Seattle afternoon. She wore jeans and a blue blazer with a "Sue the T-Rex" T-shirt underneath. Her trademark long blond hair, which I found out later is maintained mostly via Swiss army knife, hung down her back. She carried a giant paper shopping bag that looked several years beyond its natural life span and held dozens of pieces of evidence of a life most of us cannot even conceive of, let alone figure out how to live.

On assignment, I’d flown from Chicago to Seattle for this one-hour lunch–all she could offer me with her frenetic schedule. As we sat at a table next to the water, she took two items from the bag. First, a McDonald’s kids menu with "Sue the T-Rex" crossword puzzles, and second, a 23-million-year-old piece of amber from Mexico with a centipede perfectly preserved inside. I squealed as I looked at the amber, excited to get a chance to see such a thing outside a museum’s glass case.

"Yeah," Sue quipped, pushing strands of her hair away from her face, "I couldn’t do the crossword either."

For those who have avoided televisions, magazines, newspapers, radios and the Internet for the past year, Sue Hendrickson is the famed discoverer of her namesake "Sue" the T-Rex–both the most complete, well preserved Tyrannosaurus Rex ever found, and the item that commanded the single highest bid in Sotheby history. (Eight million dollars paid by Chicago’s Field Museum of Natural History, where the dinosaur was unveiled last May). Hendrickson found the skeleton in 1990 in South Dakota after a summer of digging with three other amateur fossil hunters. "She just called to me," Sue said. "I can’t explain it, but I’d never had a site draw me like that before."

In the past 30 years, "Sue Hendrickson" has become a recognizable name in the fields of marine archeology and paleontology. Long known to folks at National Geographic, Smithsonian, and Discovery, Sue has had her hand in a bevy of projects: She’s worked the amber mines in the Dominican Republic and Chiapas, Mexico, discovering three of only six butterflies ever found in amber; she’s been on dive teams that have excavated Napoleon’s shipwreck L’Orient, the San Diego shipwreck in the Philippines (the "Sue" of shipwrecks, she calls it), Cleopatra’s lost city and a Chinese trader that sank in 1500; she finds and sells rare conch pearls and dives Spanish galleons off Cuban shores. "The first time you find gold, you get really excited," she explained, "and the second time you still get excited, and after that, gold gets less exciting." What is most important to her in these endeavors is that each discovery goes where it belongs, to the collection that needs it or to the best person to study it, and not to the highest bidder. In short, Sue is to these fields what MacGyver is to string and a screwdriver–a miracle worker.

Though it’s perhaps against the rules of journalism, Sue and I became friends after that first meeting. We had a lot in common: She lives in Honduras, where I’d been several times. And she’d worked around Cuba for 20 years, where I’d also visited. We were both high-school dropouts who’d gone on to earn post-graduate degrees–Sue received an honorary doctorate from the University of Illinois at Chicago. Our conversation that day quickly turned from professional to personal, and I learned that what was most important about Sue had little, really, to do with the amazing fragments of history that ambled across her path. Certainly her ability to follow through on imagination and dreams set her apart from most bipeds, but so did her rabid need to answer the questions that arose in her monumental curiosity about the world. She is as interested in bugs and dogs as she is in pearls, peasants, and why the human species can’t seem to control itself. To her, no task is insurmountable. Government bureaucracy is a thing to untangle and fix. Overpopulation is a matter of education and scads of birth control. Wars are as stoppable as the manufacturing of weapons. And dinosaurs are just waiting in the earth to be found.

"I’m so awed by the world," Sue said. "There are just such incredible things around us all the time. We’re not an important species, although we think we are. The thing that bothers me is that over the years we’ve not progressed at all. I feel like we’re the only species that does not manage itself; we try and manage all the others, but… we’re mishandling the world. We have lots of new toys, new electronics and technology, but we’re still making the same mistakes over and over again, like overpopulation, and how much of the world’s economy is wrapped up in making wars… I would like to see [people’s] energies re-channeled from destructive to productive things."

What does not matter to Sue are the very things that define most people. She has just built her first house in 30 years after living in boats, tents, hotels and airplanes (though it’s arguable that she still lives in these, only now with a large storage unit on an island). She’s turned down meetings with Fidel Castro and movie producers who want to Hollywoodize her life. For someone with her own place in the zeitgeist, she’s surprisingly out of it. When the lead singer of Kiss brought his son to meet "Sue" (woman and dino), she called me and asked if I’d sing a couple of Kiss’s songs. "Are they a group I should know?" she asked, when my feeble renditions failed to spark familiarity. Seinfeld and Simpsons jokes careen over her head. If she has money, she gives it away. She does not understand why people so desperately need role models, though she sees the irony in her own current status as thus.

"I don’t really think we need more female role models," she said. "I just went and did it. I think if a girl’s got it in her, she’s going to go out and do it… it seems like there’s a lot of women doing so many other things."

Including Sue. In fact, many of the "other things" she does are virtually unknown though on par with her more well-known accomplishments. In these things, Sue is private. Talk to her about dinosaurs and shipwrecks, but do not talk to her about the dozens of dogs she supports throughout the world by lugging bags of dry food, medicine and sutures in countries so poor that surgical materials must be provided by the patient. ("Humans have domesticated and commandeered [dogs’] lives and I feel very responsible for them," she admits).

When Hurricane Mitch hit Honduras in 1998, 10,000 people died and Sue had 150 islanders taking refuge in her home–a truth that seems more than mere metaphor. She bought 30 acres of land and donated it to the island–enough land to build 90 houses–and she has been key in arranging the building of the island’s first medical clinic. "It’s hard to watch other people lose everything. It would be so easy if every person who has an okay life would take another family who doesn’t have an okay life and, with just a little bit of money and a little bit of effort, you can do a lot," she said. "We’re overprotected and need to be exposed to the realities of most of the world. With education you can teach people to negotiate, not fight."

She is uncomfortable giving advice, preferring to simply live her life by her own set of guiding principles and morals, though when cornered she’ll concede that perhaps the first measure of education for people ought to simply be a foray into any third world country–not as a tourist, but as an observer. "You’ll find ways to help," she said, only half-joking that the cure for confused, troubled or delinquent teenagers is to drop them into any developing country. "They’ll straighten out real quick. I’m not a crusader, but general knowledge of some very basic things is amazingly helpful… you don’t even have to travel to [help]. People in [U.S.] cities are so disconnected; they’re afraid to go into bad neighborhoods. Just go. There are problems everywhere, and you can do a lot at home."

Sue understands, though, the fear that rules so many of us. The security we need from our jobs, from our homes and cars and bank accounts. These cultural ties are nearly unbreakable, though she believes that jobs cannot replace the potential education available to us if we simply redefine security and need in our lives. "So many people think, ‘Oh I can’t quit my job because I’ll never get another one.’ Well, you will. And it might be better," she said. "Just try it because you can always stop. But people have to have a lot of drive, a lot of persistence and a lot of not caring what other people think of you."

Such ideas were not always so clear in Sue’s mind, though even as a child she remembers the desire to go, to explore, just to keep on moving. "When I was a kid and I couldn’t sleep," she remembered, "I’d imagine myself on a deserted island. I’d landed there with just what I was wearing, and I’d imagine what I’d do to survive, unraveling my T-shirt to make thread for something else, and I’d just mentally go through all the things I’d do. I guess then I just wanted to be alone to figure things out. Do all kids do that? Did you?"

Though Hurricane Mitch hit Honduras in 1998, the country and surrounding islands remain in disrepair. Out of a total population of only 5,800,000, more than one and a half million people (26 percent) were adversely affected. Many families are still homeless. The following organizations will tell you how you can help:

CARE

151 Ellis St NE
Atlanta, GA 30303-2439

Doctors Without Borders

6 East 39th Street, 8th Floor
New York, NY 10016 USA
toll free: 1-888-392-0392

U.S. Committee for UNICEF Hurricane Mitch Donation

Department 1125I
333 East 38th Street
New York, NY 10016 USA

Oxfam Canada

1011 Bloor Street West Toronto, Ont.
M6H 1M1 Canada