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Getting back to the subject of the discovery of Sue. Susan Hendrickson was a part of the fossil search team that day. She was out in the one hundred degree heat at noon scouting for fossils when she found a mass of bones eroding out of a bluff of stratified bentonite. I have done this many times.

Thie is Sue Hendrickson beside the spot where she found T-rex Sue eroding out of the bluff.

This is the bluff of typical dinosaur producing volcanic ash mixed bentonite strata where the T-rex Sue was found.

This jumbled mass was the tell tale sign of the remains of a dinosaur skeleton. Often with careful excavation and the saving of every fragment, a partially complete fossil can be reconstructed. Then she picked up two diagnostic fragments. These bones were odd, they were honeycombed with camellite structure. Only one dinosaur has this structure.    I was as surprised as she was when I saw the photo. See the photo.

Here is the dinosaur bone I found compaired to Sue's bone.

A few years ago I was looking through the fossils at the Cultural Center in Riverside California when Ruth Kirkpy's husband asked me what I was looking for. I told him I would know when I saw it. I was like Sue Hendrickson, I look everywhere for anything unusual and thus interesting. One of those times I saw this odd bone which I had never seen before. It was unidentified and was priced at about 75 cents. I bought it. I knew it was a fossil bone. I found out what it was much later when I saw the photo shown here. It was a piece of a Tyrannosaurus rex vertebra. I have done this many times before. I would find a fossil - then much later I would see one just like it in a museum or in a collection and that would identify what I had. That is how I identified the Baleen whale vertebrae I found in El Cerrito in Corona.

On the left is a top view of the baleen whale vertabrae I found in Miocene strata diatomite in lower Corona in El Cerito, California. On the right is the same one tilted up showing its right side where the rib broke off. My hand holds it where it connected to the next vertabrae.

It was in Wyoming in the Late Cretaceous, Lance Formatrion that I discovered my first Triceratops horrendous dinosaur fossil. I recognized one of the bones as the tip of the horn. I often correctly identify fossils I have never seen before. I did better than Othaniel Marsh who found a horn in the Jurassic, Morrison Formation near Colorado Springs and identified it as a Bison!

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