Dinosaur 13

One weekend in October of last year, I was incredibly sick and stayed in bed all weekend. Therefore, I watched Netflix all weekend. While perusing Netflix, I came across a documentary entitled Dinosaur 13. I had never heard of it, but as a huge dinosaur nerd, the title drew me in. Ever since I was a kid, I have been obsessed with dinosaurs. I even wanted to be a paleontologist until I was 12. And, several times since my childhood, I have had the ability to visit the fossil of a particularly famous tyrannosaurus rex named Sue in the Chicago Field Museum. But, until last October, I didn't know the story of how Sue came to be, when I watched Dinosaur 13. 

This documentary, released in 2014, Dinosaur 13 chronicles the lives of Susan Hendrickson, the Larson brothers, and Sue the T. Rex through the intense legal battle over who owned Sue. Found on the property of a Native American man in South Dakota, the Larson brothers bought the fossil--the most complete in history, at almost 90 percent--from the man for 5000 dollars. The exchange of ownership was caught on camera and officially documented in the Larson's' tiny Black Hills Museum. However, only a short time passed before an armed SWAT team seized the tyrannosaur's skeleton from the museum, holding her captive for 18 months before any chargers were pressed. Thus ensued the largest legal battle over a fossil in history, beginning in 1990 and ending around 1997.

When a vertebrate animal dies and becomes fossilized, minerals calcify the bone into rock. Although it was originally bone, once fossilized a skeleton is essentially just a hunk of stone, and that's what this documentary was about. A hunk of stone. But it was a hunk of stone that meant so much to so many people, that changed the lives of Sue Hendrickson and the Larson brothers and the people of Black Hills. Sue was a hunk of stone that was seized by armed forces for no immediate reason, and that was sold for 8.5 million dollars in an auction that lasted just over six minutes.

Somehow, Dinosaur 13 takes something so objective as a pile of rock and gives it a personality, gives it life, and gives a voice to the people who were wrongly accused of stealing her. So, as far as heart-wrenching documentaries go, Dinosaur 13 is definitely at the top of my list. 

Rating: A