There are many ways to describe SUE, the dark brown, 40-foot-long, 250-bone Tyrannosaurus rex fossil housed at the Field Museum in Chicago, enjoying pride of place as the largest, most complete, and best preserved T. rex fossil ever discovered: Twitter personality, outstanding specimen, “all-caps name-haver,” Jeff Goldblum enthusiast, and murderbird (a fan favorite). And, recently, SUE’s friends at the Field Museum of Chicago, added another descriptor: they/them. That’s right, folks: SUE uses gender-neutral pronouns.

In a world where cars are female, God is (largely considered to be) male, and other ridiculous binary gendering of objects, animals, and entities exists, having a dinosaur fossil use gender-neutral pronouns is unexpected, and that’s plain exciting to those of us who live outside our society’s gender-binary obsession.

But how did SUE come to be found and come out as nonbinary? Well, it’s quite the tale.

Finding SUE

In August 1990, amateur paleontologist Sue Hendrickson and her colleagues were preparing to leave the dig site where they had spent the summer in the South Dakota Badlands. Two days before they were set to leave, one of their trucks got a flat tire. While Hendrickson’s colleagues were fixing the tire, she took her dog, Gypsy, on a walk to see a cliff she had yet to explore near their site located on the Cheyenne River Indian Reservation.

As Hendrickson scoured the ground, she noticed what seemed to be bones and looked up. “There, about eight feet above my head, were three dinosaur backbones. I could see them clearly in the sunlight, as though [they were] waiting patiently for someone to find them,” said Hendrickson on her website. It took Hendrickson and her colleagues five days to remove the 30 feet of stone surrounding the fossil and a total of almost three weeks to extract the fossil entirely.

Since 1874, when the first Tyrannosaurus rex teeth were discovered, only a handful of skeletons that are more than half complete have been found. SUE was discovered 90 percent complete by bulk, including with their gastralia, the riblike bones that likely helped with their breathing, which are a rare discovery.