Dinosaur 13

Based on archaeologist Peter Larson's 2002 autobiographical book Rex Appeal, filmmaker Todd Douglas Miller's pulse-quickening documentary chronicles the legal scandal that followed the electrifying 1990 discovery in South Dakota of the most complete T. rex skeleton yet, by Larson and other maverick excavators of the Black Hills Institute of Geological Research. Affectionately named "Sue" (after Larson's onetime girlfriend), the flesh-eating giant proved only to be an amateur carnivore compared to the lawyers, prosecutors, and other human predators that followed. When the shady landowner (not interviewed) on whose property Sue was found realized that a potential fortune could be made, he invoked Washington D.C. treaties with Lakota Sioux to claim that the bones were stolen U.S. government property. Stormtrooper-like feds and guards rolled into the small, panicked community in paramilitary fashion, seized the fossil, and indicted Larson on a slew of felonies. Would Sue be sold to a super-rich private collector and not a museum or learning institution? Relationships evolve (or go extinct) during this whole affair, and while the ending is ultimately upbeat, the ivory-tower snobs of mainstream academia are faulted for not aiding the Black Hills Institute, whom they regarded as scientific inferiors. Highly recommended. (C. Cassady)