When Peter Larson and his team at the Black Hills Institute discovered the world's largest and most complete Tyrannosaurus rex skeleton beneath a South Dakota butte in 1990, Larson knew it was the find of a lifetime. He had no way of foreseeing that "Sue," as they called the fossil, was about to plunge him down a rabbit hole into a topsy-turvy world of FBI agents, government prosecutors, powerful museums, Native American tribes, and competing paleontologists. As Larson began the biggest battle of his life "to hold onto Sue and to keep himself out of prison - an amazing thing happened. He and his Black Hills team began finding more and more T. rex es. Reinventing the science of paleontology and hitting paydirt again and again, Larson became a lightning rod for the controversies rocking paleontology and the envy of fellow bonehunters everywhere.

Peter Larson and his staff are now arguably the world's leading experts on the field collection and preparation of dinosaur skeletons. They are unquestionably the most successful T. rex hunters in history. All told, Black Hills Institute has unearthed seven T. rexes - far more than any other organization in the world. Peter and his crew don't have university grants or funding, they don't have a staff of hundreds - they don't even have Ph.D.s - yet their work has appeared in the scientific press and their story has been told in National Geographic, Time, Newsweek, The New Yorker, and all the nation's major newspapers. How do they do it? As Peter tells us, it's about passion and persistence; it's about bucking the academic establishment, and sometimes even the U.S. Government, in the pursuit of discovery.

Kristin Donnan - the reporter for NBC's Unsolved Mysteries who went to South Dakota to cover Peter's stuggle for Sue and wound up marrying her subject - takes Rex Appeal (Invisible Cities Press, August 2002) into the field and into the courtroom, telling for the first time the complete personal story of the legal battle that eventually landed Peter in Prison and Sue in Chicago's field Museum. Throughout the journey, from Peter we hear about the art, science, and high technology of creating the fantastic restored skeletons we marvel at in museums. Illustrated with more than 100 photographs and diagrams, Rex Appeal is natural history at its best - educational and informative, controversial and groundbreaking, but also personal and engaging; it is the most complete guide to hunting, restoring, and understanding T. rex ever published.

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