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Agents dug up more problems for archaeologist

December 7, 1998
By Bill Moushey, Post-Gazette Staff Writer

It all started with the fossilized skeleton of a tyrannosaurus rex that Peter Larson excavated in South Dakota in 1990.

Larson had permission from the Indian rancher whose land he was searching to look for fossils. And he paid the rancher $5,000 for this find, before turning it over to the Black Hills Institute of Geological Research, which Larson founded in 1974.

That’s where the government stepped in. The rancher had placed his land in trust to the government, federal officials said. So Larson had no right to anything found there and had to return the dinosaur bone. The rancher, in fact, claimed he didn’t realize Larson’s check was for the dinosaur fossil.

Larson, of Hill City, S.D., appealed all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, which sided with the government.

But that’s not where the story ended.

In fighting Larson’s civil case, federal agents seized his records and the institute’s records in 1992, scrutinized them for two years, then brought a 39-count indictment against him. He was convicted of two misdemeanors that are rarely enforced — taking a fossil worth less than $100 from federal lands and possessing a fossil from federal lands. He also was convicted on two felony counts of possessing more than $10,000 in "monetary instruments," cash and traveler’s checks without declaring it when leaving or entering the country.

The charges were retaliation pure and simple for Larson’s outspoken reaction to the federal government’s tactics, Larson’s defenders said.

None of the charges he faced related to the trophy dinosaur fossil he’d found. The money he’d taken out of the country hadn’t been for drugs or other criminal activity. But Larson lost his appeals and was sentenced to two years in prison.

His lawyer, Patrick Duffy, offered this analysis to the media in South Dakota at the time: "The moral is, ‘Don’t [anger] the Department of Justice, because they’ll crush you.’ "