Family Field Nights: Boo with SUE

About This Event

This is an after-hours Halloween event built around the Field Museum's own biggest celebrity: SUE, the most complete Tyrannosaurus rex skeleton ever found, with the museum quieter and more atmospheric after normal visiting hours end.

SUE was discovered on August 12, 1990, by fossil hunter Sue Hendrickson, who spotted a few vertebrae jutting out of a South Dakota bluff and followed the hunch that there was more underneath — it took a six-person crew 17 days to dig the whole skeleton out. What followed was a genuinely ugly five-year ownership fight between the discoverers, a Native American landowner, and the federal government, which only got resolved at a public auction: Sotheby's sold SUE in October 1997 for $8.36 million in just nine minutes, a record price for a fossil at the time, won by the Field Museum with help from McDonald's and Disney. SUE finally went on permanent display in the museum's main hall in May 2000.

Worth knowing: this runs 6-9 PM, after the museum's normal hours — check fieldmuseum.org for pricing and whether advance registration is required.