People think finding a dinosaur means digging a hole and pulling out a skeleton. It almost never works that way.
Gus is a 38-foot-long T. rex, one of the largest and most complete ever discovered — 63% complete, with those bones making up 75 to 80% of the animal's total mass. He was found in 2021 in South Dakota, on a ranch where the team had just wrapped another project and decided, almost on a whim, to spend an awkward couple of days prospecting somewhere stranger than usual. The first bone — a metatarsal — broke the surface within hours.
What followed was five years of excavation, mapping, and restoration: nearly a thousand individual pieces collected, identified, and painstakingly reassembled by hand, bone by bone, in a process that has almost nothing in common with how the movies show it. The animal was eventually mounted on a custom armature inside one of the only spaces in town big enough to hold him — a pickleball court.
Gus is named for Gary Licking, the rancher whose land he was found on. Gary died partway through the process and never saw the finished mount. His widow, Dana, has stayed close to the project throughout, and the team still brings her in whenever there's a piece of Gus she'll want to see.
