For the time being, that $8.4 million Tyrannosaurus Rex skeleton the Field Museum bought in auction last October could more correctly be called The Dino Formerly Known As Sue.
For legal reasons, the museum Friday abandoned the name by which the celebrated fossil has been known since it was discovered on federal Indian land in South Dakota in 1990. Instead, the Field on Tuesday is launching a nationwide contest to let schoolchildren from kindergarten through 6th grade come up with a new name for the skeleton–the biggest, most complete T. Rex specimen ever found.
More Top Picks Best Blackout Curtains For Nurseries
The abandonment of the Sue name marks another turn in the tortured history of the dinosaur fossil, originally named in honor of the woman who discovered it, Susan Hendrickson. Late last year, the museum offered Hendrickson’s former employer, the Black Hills Institute of Geological Research, $125,000 for exclusive rights to the Sue name for the fossil.
The institute declined the offer. Considering the expensive tug-of-war that has been ongoing over the fossil since its discovery, the reason was predictable: money.
A lawyer for the institute said Friday it would have given the museum rights to the name for nothing. But, said Luke Santangelo, the institute’s trademark attorney, it wanted to reserve a licensing right on the name in case it was used by two powerful commercial sponsors–McDonald’s and Walt Disney–who helped the Field buy the dinosaur.
While the institute had no claim on the ownership of the fossil when the Field purchased it Oct. 4, it did claim ownership of the Sue name. Santangelo said trademark law grants a trademark right to those who use a name first, and the institute was the first to call the dinosaur Sue.
Six days after the Field bought the fossil, on Oct. 10, the institute formally filed a federal trademark claim on the name, he said.
Laura Gates, the Field’s vice president for museum affairs, said Friday that the museum “believes there is no legal basis for this claim.”
Nonetheless, Gates said, the Field for weeks had attempted to negotiate an agreement with the institute, hoping to come to an agreement that would allow the museum the unrestricted right to use the name. “We came to a point where we realized that we were not going to be able to reach an agreement with the institute,” Gates said. “So we decided to just move on.”
Despite being perhaps the most spectacular dinosaur fossil ever found–and demonstrably the most expensive one–since her discovery, “Sue” has seemed more like a curse on the Black Hills Institute.
Having sent Susan Hendrickson on the land to prospect for bones with prior approval from the man who lived there, the institute subsequently paid the man $5,000 for the bones after the discovery.
Two years later, however, the FBI claimed the bones belonged to the federal government and seized them from the institute’s offices in Hill City, S.D., charging the institute’s co-founder, Peter Larson, with theft of federal property.
Those charges were dropped later, but Larson was found guilty of another, unrelated federal charge of taking $10,000 in undeclared traveler’s checks out of the country and served 18 months in prison.