A flat tire at 6 a.m. is usually a bad omen, but for Sue Hendrickson, it meant something marvelous.

When a group of fossil hunters awoke on the next-to-last day of a two-month dinosaur dig in South Dakota, they found their truck had a flat tire. When they changed the flat, they learned the spare tire had low pressure, too. Hendrickson told her colleagues to take the truck to town to get the flat fixed so she could explore a region that had caught her eye weeks earlier.

Setting out with her golden retriever, Gypsy, she soon reached “the one little place we missed.”

“I saw six bones sticking out of the rock,” the diver-turned-fossil hunter said. “That was Sue.”

Sue is a fossilized Tyrannosaurus rex skeleton, a life-sized model of which is on display at COSI until September. Her namesake came to Toledo yesterday to speak about the dig and the dinosaur. About 600 people, many of them children, attended the 11 a.m. talk, said museum spokeswoman Lori Hauser.

Hendrickson never gave a prepared lecture, instead taking questions from the audience for about 45 minutes. “I don't write and I don't speak,” she said later. But that didn't matter to the eager people, young and older, in the crowd. They peppered her with questions:

What was missing from the 90 percent complete skeleton? A hand and arm, one foot, the tip of her tail, and a couple of ribs, Hendrickson replied.

How do you find a dinosaur? You walk and walk and walk, in a desert area that has no grass to cover the bones.

What had Sue eaten for lunch before she died? A duck-billed, plant-eating dinosaur. Its fossilized remains were found with Sue's.

How long did it take to dig up Sue? Only 17 days, because her skeleton was all together. But it took four years to clean the bones once Sue had been freed from the earth.

How do you tell if something's rock or fossilized bone? You can put it on your tongue. Bone has tiny holes, so it will stick to your tongue. Rock will fall off.

How tall was Sue? She measured 13 feet high at the hip, and was 42 feet long.

Standing before the chocolate-colored model of the T. rex and taking questions from a crowd is a long way from Hendrickson's roots. As a shy girl growing up outside Chicago in Muster, Ind., she wanted to be a veterinarian and a missionary, she said in an earlier telephone interview. By high school, she had discovered a love for languages and thought she might work as an interpreter. Hunting dinosaurs never even crossed her mind.

But reality interfered with her plans, and she moved to California, then Florida, where she leaned to dive. That led to an interest in marine archaeology and shipwrecks.

One diving job involved a 400-year-old ship, in which she found an intact chicken egg. Off the coast of northern Africa, she's explored sunken cities, and a Napoleonic shipwreck.

“It's like a drug. You get addicted,” she said of her diving expeditions. “I get really excited about the personal things. When we worked on a Napoleon's shipwreck in Egypt, I found a man's shoe, and I found rings. You put them on and imagine what life was like.”

Hendrickson hopes to explore more shipwrecks, in addition to her land-based fossil hunting. “I've got to follow my passion.”

But in the meantime, she's enjoying the “T. rex Named Sue” experience - and the fact the dinosaur that bears her name may well have been a girl.

“I like very much that the biggest, baddest beast that walked on earth was a female,” she said.

First Published August 2, 2002, 1:06 p.m.