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In fact, she lives on the water -- in a tiled house in the Honduran Bay Islands -- when she's not off exploring the world. It's her first permanent address in 30 years, and she shares it with her "kids"-- three dogs (who are, at this moment, waiting in the car for leftovers from her brie and salmon pizza). It occurred to me that God, great lover of irony, may have been having a little fun with Hendrickson by giving her landlocked Midwestern origins. Hendrickson's had the last laugh, though, having now spent half her life in the company of amphibians. Even back when she was growing up in Indiana, she used to hop over the Illinois border and loiter around Lake Michigan at Navy Pier.

"I hated my high school and I hated my hometown," she told a Chicago Tribune reporter recently. "I was bored."

There is what appears to be a bullet hole in the restaurant window above her head and both my forks are covered in thick, yellow crust, but we are near the water and that is all that matters. It's pouring down rain.

She tells me she almost went to college, but instead spent a year making boat sails in Seattle, where her family is now settled. She slogged through a few classes until a dean told her that it would take seven years of caffeine, deadlines, dissecting fish and taking pollution counts before she could have a Ph.D. So she went to Florida and collected tropical fish with all the other Ph.Ds. (Her mother finally quit saving college money for her when she turned 30.)

For several years after that, Hendrickson helped raise sunken planes and boats off the coast of Key West, but it wasn't until she visited the Dominican Republic on a marine archeology project that she was introduced to amber by a miner.

Formed from tree resins, amber pristinely preserves ants, scorpions, spiders, beetles and other insects, and is reminiscent of campy faux ice cubes with plastic bugs inside them. Hendrickson has collected some of the most well-known pieces in the world, many of which she sells to museums, scientists or private collectors. Others she donates. "I could be better at business," she says of her philanthropy, "but I choose not to be."

Today she shows me two pieces, each about a square inch, that she will donate to the Field Museum. One contains a spider, the other a centipede. They feel smooth in my hand, and the detail is so clear I can see the centipede's hairs. Both are 23 million years old. I hoot about never having held an object so profoundly ancient. "It's pretty neat," she says with the dry banality of a New Englander seeing a mussel shell.

Though she doesn't consider herself an expert on anything but amber, she reads all she can before each project she undertakes and admits to having friends photocopy entire books and send them to her.

Today, she is versed in extinct crustaceans, ancient olive jars, Ming vases, fossils, Chinese shipwrecks, South American geology, marine mammals and, of course, treasure chests of gold, which are apparently so common in her line of work they fail to elicit even innocuous finders-keepers melees. "The first time you find gold, you get really excited. And the second time, you still get excited and after that, gold gets less exciting."

So far she's had three offers to do a book of her life and one to do a movie. (She has photos of Steven Spielberg caressing dino "Sue's" desk-size cranium.) One high school classmate tracked her down and repeatedly offers to be her agent. Hendrickson nixes all offers. "I don't want to be packaged," she says. "I really don't feel I'm that important. Maybe it's because I'm a paleontologist, but we're really nothing. We're not even a second in the universe. Why write a book about me?"

One of her few concessions to publicity -- beyond meeting me today -- has been to allow McDonald's, which contributed part of the money along with Disney for the Field Museum's purchase of "Sue" (it sold at Sotheby's auction house for $8.3 million), to use her photo in a kids' menu filled with puzzles, mazes, quizzes. She handed me a copy when I sat down with her. "I couldn't finish the crossword puzzle," she'd quipped.

Hendrickson's jokes are rare and dry, and I get the sense that there is always a yearning emanating from her. She seems slightly uncomfortable above ground among all the jabbering humans who have suddenly come crawling out of the woodwork to immortalize her in the modern media -- myself included.

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