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Lucky break, she figures.

How unusual is it to find a T-Rex? In the Western United States, where dinosaurs are known to have proliferated, bone fragments from the ancient beasts crunch under your feet as you walk. But that's about as close as you'll get to the granddaddy of dinos. You might find a portion of a triceratops or part of a duckbill dinosaur, maybe even a mammoth-size tooth, but never a T-Rex. Only 25 have ever been found. Sue Hendrickson, whose giant, carnivorous namesake is currently being cleaned and assembled for a show in May 2000 at Chicago's Field Museum of Natural History, puts it this way: "Every day we'd wake up [in the field] and jokingly say, 'Today I'm gonna get me a saber-toothed cat.' But a T-Rex? You don't even joke about that. It's too far-fetched."

With her long, blond hair graying at the edges and a lifetime of sun and sea etched into her smile, Hendrickson has looked the part of a modern-day explorer since long before Lonely Planet made it hip to trek mountains and dive reef. Once an inquisitive high school dropout from Munster, Ind., with a yen for adventure, she is now a self-taught field paleontologist and marine archaeologist, known by folks at places like the Smithsonian, National Geographic and Discovery for her keen eye, her boundless curiosity and her altruistic spirit. She's worked on projects in Peru, Egypt, the Philippines, the Dominican Republic, Cuba and Mexico. In fact, she's ubiquitous. Natural history museums all over the world owe a debt to Hendrickson and her work. "I'm like a kid who didn't grow up," she says. "I do all the things you wanted to do when you were young -- digging for dinosaurs and diving for shipwrecks."

Aside from unearthing "Sue," Hendrickson has also explored a Chinese trader ship from the 1500s, Cleopatra's palace and Napoleon's shipwreck (as part of a diving expedition program recently aired on the Discovery channel). She was a member of the team that discovered the famous San Diego shipwreck off the coast of the Philippines (the "Sue" of shipwrecks, she calls it); and dives shipwrecks in Cuba so regularly that she has often acted as liaison between foreign dive teams and the Cuban government.

"Those of us who do field work rely on the specimens found by amateurs," said Pete Larson, paleontologist at the Black Hills Institute in South Dakota who was with Hendrickson the day she found "Sue." He says she has "natural skill. She's meticulous. She brought me vertebra pieces [from "Sue"] and I knew immediately. We ran the whole way. It was like climbing Everest. The most exciting day of my life." It took four people 21 14-hour days to remove 1,200 tons of dirt and unearth "Sue."

Next page | God, lover of irony, may have had a little fun with Hendrickson