Faith: Where Sue the T. Rex Was Found

Faith, South Dakota is a small cattle town on the high plains of Meade County, founded in nineteen ten when homesteaders followed the railroad into what turned out to be genuinely hard agricultural country. Most of the early farmers eventually gave up and sold their land to ranchers, and Faith became what it remains today: a place organized around livestock auctions and grassland cattle operations. Then one August morning in nineteen ninety, a fossil hunter named Susan Hendrickson walked a formation called the Hell Creek, about fifteen miles northeast of town, and spotted a cluster of bones eroding out of a butte.

She had found one of the most complete Tyrannosaurus rex skeletons ever discovered, a creature forty-two feet long estimated to be sixty-seven million years old. The fossil was nicknamed Sue. After years of legal disputes over ownership, the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago purchased it at auction in nineteen ninety-seven for eight million, three hundred sixty-two thousand, five hundred dollars, the highest price ever paid for a dinosaur fossil at the time.

Faith has embraced the connection, and a sculpture of Sue now stands along the highway through town.