The largest and most intact T. rex ever found has known two stable homes since the animal died beside a river 67 million years ago: that sandy bank, which gradually evolved into a South Dakota hillside, and, for most of the last two decades, under the name Sue, the main hall of the Field Museum of Natural History.
Friday, the Chicago museum’s prime specimen will be unveiled in its third set of digs, a dramatic second-floor gallery near the other dinosaurs but in a space dedicated to telling the story of Sue, from lifestyle to discovery to its current incarnation as a set of fossilized bones assembled to demonstrate full predatory awesomeness.
“Are you wearing running shoes?” asks the new explanatory video projected onto and around Sue’s bones and playing every 20 or so minutes. No matter. If you were this close to the real creature, “it would be too late.”
It is not too late, however, to see Sue anew, no matter how familiar Chicagoans think they may be with this dinosaur, a core point of civic pride since it was first mounted here in 2000. The Field, in its 125th anniversary year, bet that it could reinvigorate the $8.4 million skeleton, and, as a Tuesday media preview of the new exhibition showed, it has succeeded.
Even as it hangs onto, even amplifies, Sue’s central character trait — menace — the new exhibit puts it into elegant, almost artful surroundings, a selection of information, Cretaceous-era animation and other fossils. The goal was to place this apex predator in as complete a context as museum scientists and exhibit designers could conjure.
“Sue is the crest specimen of the collections here, and also probably the most important dinosaur fossil that’s ever been discovered,” said Richard Lariviere, the Field CEO, sporting a new Sue T-shirt for the event. “So it’s appropriate it would have this focus here.”
Instead of serving as a de facto official greeter by the main north door of the museum — that role is now served by Maximo, a cast skeleton of a Patagotitan, a kind of titanosaur with a credible claim to being the largest dinosaur yet found — Sue is now in a bespoke gallery that, for the first time, unites it with all the other Sue science that had been scattered about the museum.
Sue’s skull, instead of being on the second floor separated from the rest of the body, now rests much nearer by. It’s not mounted on the body in part because it became a little deformed over the eons, in part because it is the most frequently studied part of Sue and constant removal would be a burden.
Indeed, the skull now is the teaser for the main attraction. Stare into those eye sockets, then step round the wall bearing a T. rex mural to see the big reveal of the fossil itself. It’s still on a stylized land form, but now the lighting casts shadows of those teeth against the wall, and now the 40.5-foot-long critter fills its space with the suggestion of brute force only magnified when you read that the jaws could crush a car door.
The second floor gallery, now a stop on the path through the superb “Evolving Planet” exhibit, was always meant to be Sue’s home, explained Peter Makovicky, curator of dinosaurs. But the budget was small and the desire to show off this trophy was large, and Sue became a main hall regular, along with the totem poles and the fighting elephants.
A 3-D theater has been filling that space, and people apparently are less of a structural strain than a big fossilized skeleton in the middle of the room.
Now, there are new pillars supporting the floor from beneath and now, following on the movie theme, scientifically accurate animation videos are projected behind the Sue skeleton. They show, for instance, Sue scavenging by a river then (science!) voiding itself and a triceratops and Sue fighting — the video animal gets a horn wound just like one on its actual hip.
As T. rex prey, a triceratops, in the form of a great skull from the collection, joins the gallery, along with dozens of plant and animal fossils from Sue’s era, some of them actually found with it.
About that pronoun: Although named for discoverer Sue Hendrickson, Sue is of unknown sex. The fossil is properly referred to as “it,” the labels explain, while Sue’s online presence, most prominent in a saucy Twitter feed, chooses to go by the pronoun “they.”
In shaping the new, general admission hall over the course of 2018, the goal, Lariviere said, was to address all such questions that visitors have had about Sue over the years, “everything from how Sue hunted to how Sue pooped,” he said.
And the changes in the presentation of the skeleton — including a much fuller chest thanks to the mounting of formerly separated gastralia, or “belly ribs” — are all carefully detailed on accompanying labels and help tell a bigger story.
“We wanted to use Sue as a vehicle to inform the public that science is never done,” said Lariviere. “You’re always understanding.”
The museum asks understanding from its patrons, as well. It will no doubt rankle some Sue fans to see the animal suffering a seeming demotion to a perimeter hall. But centrality isn’t everything.
While joining and enriching the exhibition telling the story of life on the planet that was already one of the finest in the city, this new Sue presentation delivers a much more complete picture of the animal even as it belies a sort of maxim: You can teach an old bird new tricks.
The Sue exhibit in the Griffin Halls of Evolving Planet is open to the public Friday at the Field Museum, 1400 S. Lake Shore Drive; included with general admission, www.fieldmuseum.org
sajohnson@chicagotribune.com
Twitter @StevenKJohnson
