Earlham College | News from Public Affairs

Sue arrives at the Joseph Moore Museum on March 5

An artist’s rendering of what Sue may have looked like while alive, complete with razor-sharp teeth measuring up to a foot in length. Although the animal’s skull weighs 600 pounds, its brain cavity was only roughly the size of a quart of milk. (Image courtesy of The Field Museum.)

RICHMOND, Ind. — Dinosaur devotees get ready. Sue is coming to Earlham College.

As part of the planning for a special community event at Earlham’s Joseph Moore Museum, Director John Iverson and Education Coordinator Carol Stocksdale have arranged for a very special attraction: a life-size cast of the skull of Sue, the most complete and best-preserved Tyrannosaurus rex fossil ever found.

The five-foot-long replica, complete with 58 “teeth” (themselves measuring up to a foot in length), will arrive at the museum on Sunday evening, March 5 — day two of a unique marathon during which the doors of the regional natural history museum will remain open to visitors for 100 hours.

The round-the-clock opening, explains Iverson, is meant to help mark the 100th anniversary of the American Association of Museums (AAM), of which Joseph Moore Museum is a member.

“The association has been sending stuff out all over the country with lists of things museums can do to share in the 100th anniversary,” says Iverson, also a professor of biology at the College. He adds that with considerations already underway for the Joseph Moore Museum’s annual spring open house, “We thought about it a while and had the idea for a 100-hour opening.

Earlham students, many of them involved in the College’s science or museum studies programs, will staff the building adjoining Dennis Hall from the start of the marathon at 2 p.m. on Saturday, March 4, until its conclusion at 6 p.m. the following Wednesday (March 8).

Admission to the museum always is free, a policy that will be extended for the special Sue exhibit as “our gift to the community,” Iverson says.

From 2 until 5 p.m. on Saturday, Iverson and Stocksdale have scheduled a variety of activities for visitors of all ages, from face painting to display preparations to shows in Teetor Planetarium. This is in addition to normal open house activities, including public access to many of the museum’s normally behind-the-scenes collections. Refreshments also will be available and door prizes awarded, says Iverson.

On Sunday, Monday and Tuesday nights of the marathon, meanwhile, several nature movies will be presented at 8 p.m. and 11 p.m. Among the films to be screened is the 2006 Academy Award-nominated documentary March of the Penguins.

Multimillion Dollar Baby

One of only seven at least half-complete T. rex skeletons known to exist, Sue was discovered in 1990 at a dig site near Faith, South Dakota, by fossil hunter Sue Hendrickson, whose colleagues quickly named the momentous find in her honor. Because of a legal dispute over who owned the land where the bones were discovered, however, it took more than seven years before Sue finally was purchased at auction by The Field Museum of Chicago for $8.4 million — still the highest amount ever paid for a fossil.

Today, the dinosaur’s remains are on permanent display in the great hall of the museum, where “she” (no one is actually sure whether the creature was male or female) greets hundreds of thousands of visitors each year.

At 42 feet long and 13 feet high at the hips, Sue also is the largest T. rex specimen ever found. According to Field Museum curators, the skeleton’s completeness, combined with the “exquisite” preservation of the bones, make Sue “an invaluable scientific resource” permitting highly detailed study of T. rex anatomy.

Prized by paleontologists above all is Sue’s skull, extricated by Field Museum technicians from the rocky matrix in which it was embedded — for 67 million years — after more than 3,500 hours of painstaking effort. The structure and arrangement of bones in the skull give scientists some of the clearest indications about how the enormous animal ate, breathed and sensed its environment, as well as how T. rex may be related to other creatures.

Weighing in at 600 pounds, Sue’s actual skull is the only section of the dinosaur not mounted as part of The Field Museum’s display; it simply is too heavy to be supported by the steel armature supporting the rest of the skeleton’s more than 200 recovered bones. In its place, the museum also uses a cast replica, while keeping the real skull in a separate exhibit.

Lights, Camera, Action!

Early March will be an exceptionally busy time at Joseph Moore Museum. Just days after the 100-hour marathon ends, areas of the building will be transformed into a movie set for several scenes of an independent feature film being produced by Arizona-based Northanger Productions.

The young adult comedy, tentatively titled Zorg and Andy, deals with the problems caused when an ancient idol with supernatural powers is stolen from the collection of a certain campus museum and the efforts of archeology student Andy and his friends to retrieve the purloined relic. Joseph Moore Museum was chosen as a location for many key scenes in the film because a Northanger production assistant remembered the facility from a visit she made while an undergraduate at Anderson (Ind.) University and thought it would make a perfect setting.

The movie’s producers are expected to cast a number of Earlham theatre students as “extras” in the film, while other students in Information Technology and Media Director Wes Miller’s educational media and video production classes will serve as technical crew.

Filming in the museum is scheduled to begin on Saturday, March 11, and wrap by Wednesday, March 15. As yet there are no details on when the direct-to-video feature will be available to the public.

Contact:
John Iverson, professor of biology and Joseph Moore Museum director
765/983-1303 — E-Mail John