In 1990, a fossil-hunting team working in the South Dakota badlands made a dramatic discovery: their truck had a flat tire. While most of the team took the truck into town to get patched, Sue Hedrickson stayed behind to pick around some exposed sandstone bluffs nearby. What she found, and what now bears her first name, is the largest, most complete skeleton of a Tyrannosaurus rex ever found.

Sue is amazingly well-preserved. Sixty-seven million years in the South Dakota soil seems to have done little damage to her six hundred-pound skull. Even the delicate bones of her inner ear, once attached to her eardrum, were there. The bones of her seven-ton body have kept all their original texture, allowing scientists to learn much about the hardships of her life (paleontologists believe she suffered from spinal arthritis, as well as broken ribs that had healed somewhat messily).

I was personally very excited when I learned that the Field Museum in Chicago had, with the help of generous corporate and private donations, purchased Sue for their permanent dinosaur collection. Growing up in southeastern Wisconsin, the city of Chicago was close enough for "special occasion" weekend trips. Especially around the holidays, my family would head down I-94 to spend a day or two touring around the Windy City, staring at impossibly high skyscrapers, window shopping along the Magnificent Mile, and most importantly, visiting the excellent Chicago museums.

Some of my favorite memories from childhood involve planetarium shows at the Adler, walking through the giant human heart at the Museum of Science and Industry (a little scary), or slapping my hands on the cold iron surface of a meteorite at the Field Museum as my dad told me how this very rock beneath my hands used to drift between the planets in the cold reaches of space. There was so much magic in those museum halls, so much drama and awe.

Sue would, I knew, fit perfectly in that old great hall. I couldn't wait to see her in person. This winter vacation, I made a special effort to get back to the Field Museum. After several years living in Southern California, it felt deliciously seasonal to run in from the frigid, windy parking lot into the impressive main atrium, a soaring Roman temple dedicated to the power of wonder and the nobility of science. It was wonderful to stand exactly where I had stood as a child, and feel very much the same emotions. It was in these halls that I had vowed to become a scientist. There was so much knowledge here, so many new facts to learn.

The overwhelming impression I got from the museums was how much scientists knew about tbe universe. When I was a child, twenty five years ago, that was exactly the impression of science the museums were aiming for. But things have changed since then, and what the Field Museum did with Sue turned out to be a wonderful example of how our view of science has subtly shifted in the last generation.

Instead of a dimly-lit, dusty old hall, I found Sue under full lights in the main atrium. Sue didn't need any special lighting to be dramatic. Her skeleton had been arranged on a steel frame that allowed her to assume an active, life-like position, as if she was trotting along the old stream bed in South Dakota where she was found. One thing I noticed right away was that some bones looked very different from the others. A friendly docent explained that although Sue was the most complete tyrannosaur known, some bones had been missing and needed to be re-created.

The museum had made sure those bones looked smooth and somewhat fake, so as not to confuse people about which bones were real. Her skull had been too heavy for the steel mount, so a cast was made and put on the skeleton for display, while her real skull rested in a nearby case. Sue's real skull was displayed at eye-level, allowing people to peer inside. Captions pointed out details on her enormous teeth.

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