Tyrannosaurus rex isn’t just a king to paleontologists — the dinosaur increasingly reigns over the world of art auctions. Stan theskeleton is a complete skeleton. T. rexIts price was $31.8 million in October 2020, breaking all records. This was the highest ever paid fossil price. Sue the T. rexThe top spot was held by the property, which sold for $8.3million in 1997.
That kind of publicity — and cachet — means that T. rex’s value is sky-high, and the dinosaur continues to have its teeth firmly sunk into the auction world in 2022. Maximus, the aforementioned dinosaur, was auctioned off in December. T. rex skull, will be the centerpiece of a Sotheby’s auction in New York City. It’s expected to sell for about $15 million.
Another T. rex fossil named Shen was anticipated to sell for between $15 million and $25 million at a Christie’s auction in Hong Kong in late November. It was pulled by Christie’s due to concerns about the amount of replica bones in the fossil.
“These are astronomical sums of money, really surprising sums of money,” says Donna Yates, a criminologist at Maastricht University in the Netherlands who studies high-value collectibles.
Stan’s final price “was completely unexpected,” Yates says. The fossil was originally appraised at about $6 million — still a very large sum, though nothing like the final tally, which was the result of a three-way bidding war.
The staggering sums of money are amazing T. rexScience can suffer if fossils go up for sale. Research says that the prices at which fossils are sold can be prohibitive for public institutions seeking to access the deep past.
The sky-high prices could be due to one reason: T. rexYates says fossils are becoming more rare scientific evidence than works of art. The bones might once have been bought and sold at dusty “cowboy fossil” dealerships. But nowadays these fossils are on display in shiny gallery spaces and are being appraised and marketed as rare objets d’art. That’s appealing to collectors, she adds: “If you’re a high-value buyer, you’re a person who wants the finest things.”
But fossils’ true value is the information they hold, says Thomas Carr, a paleontologist at Carthage College in Kenosha, Wis. “They are our only means of understanding the biology and evolution of extinct animals.”
Conserving fossils T. rex Public repositories such as museums and dinosaurs ensure that scientists have constant access to the objects to enable them to be studied, replicated or reexamined. But a fossil sold into private or commercial hands is subject to the whim of its owner — which means anything could happen to it at any time, Carr says.
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“It doesn’t matter if [a T. rex fossil] is bought by some oligarch in Russia who says scientists can come and study it,” he says. “You might as well take a sledgehammer to it and destroy it.”
A desire for one’s own T. rex
There are about 120 specimens. T. rexIn the world. At least half of them are owned privately and aren’t available to the public. That loss is “wreaking havoc on our dataset. If we don’t have a good sample size, we can’t claim to know anything about [T. rex],” Carr says.
To be able, for example, to know all the ways that T. rex males differed from females, researchers need between 70 and 100 good specimens for statistically significant analyses, an amount scientists don’t currently have.
Scientists know very little about the same. How T. rexThe number of grewThis could be done by studying the fossils of children.SN: 1/6/20). Only a few juveniles are allowed to participate. T. rexResearchers have access to specimens. If private specimens were added, this number would be double.
Museums and academic institutions typically don’t have the kind of money it takes to compete with private bidders in auctions or any such competitive sales. That’s why, in the month before Stan went up for auction in 2020, the Society for Vertebrate Paleontology, or SVP, wrote a letter to Christie’sAsking the auction house to limit bidding to public institutions. This would allow scientists to have a fighting chance of obtaining the specimens.
But the request was ignored — and unfortunately may have only increased publicity for the sale, says Stuart Sumida, a paleontologist at California State University in San Bernardino and SVP’s current vice president. That’s why SVP didn’t issue a public statement this time ahead of the auctions for Shen and Maximus, Sumida says, though the organization continues to strongly condemn fossil sales — whether of large, dramatic specimens or less well-known creatures. “All fossils are data. Our position is that selling fossils is not scientific and it damages science.”
Sumida is particularly appalled at statements made by auction houses that suggest the skeletons “have already been studied,” an attempt to reassure researchers that the data contained in that fossil won’t be lost, regardless of who purchases it. That’s deeply misleading, he says, because of the need for reproducibility, as well as the always-improving development of new analysis techniques. “When they make public statements like that, they are undermining not only paleontology, but the scientific process as well.”
The market is booming because of the high prices Sue and Stan have earned, but not just for their products. T. rexFossils, but also less well-known species. “It creates this ripple effect that is incredibly damaging to science in general,” Sumida says. Sotheby’s, for example?,uctioned off a Gorgosaurus, a T. rexrelative, in July for $6.9 million. In May, a Deinonychus antirrhopus — the inspiration for Jurassic Park’s velociraptor — was sold by Christie’s for $12.4 million.
Protecting T. rexFrom collectors
Problematically, the United States does not have any protections for fossils found in private landowners’ backyards. Nearly every country in the world is represented in the U.S. T. rex skeleton ever found. Stan, Sue, and Maximus are from the Black Hills in South Dakota. Shen was discovered in Montana.
The United States prohibits the collection of scientifically useful fossils since 2009, especially fossils of vertebrate-specific species. T. rexUsing public lands without permission. But fossils found on private lands are still considered the landowner’s personal property. Landowners have the right to grant digging access to anyone they choose.
Before Sue was discovered T. rex (SN: 9/6/14Private owners gave scientists access to their land for free, which was a common practice. But in the wake of Sue’s sale in 1997, researchers began to have to compete for digging access with commercial fossil hunters.
These hunters are able to afford large amounts of money to the landowners in order to be allowed to dig. They also get a portion of the proceeds from fossil sales. Many of these commercial dealers also sell fossils at auction houses. These auction houses can offer a much higher profit than museums.
Lack of federal protections for paleontological resources found on private land — combined with the large available supply of fossils — is a situation unique to the United States, Roddy says. France, Canada and China are fossil-rich countries. They consider any such finds to fall under their protection as part of their national legacy.
In the United States, seizing such materials from private landowners — under an eminent domain argument — would require the government to pay “just compensation” to the landowners. But using eminent domain to generally protect such fossils wouldn’t be financially sustainable for the government, Roddy says, not least because most fossils dug up aren’t of great scientific value anyway.
She believes there may be more grassroots ways to regulate fossil fuel sales. Roddy is still a DePaul University law student in Chicago. These ideas were briefly outlined belowIn an article published in Texas A&M Journal of Property LawMai
One solution, she suggests, is that states attach a sales tax to fossil purchases. This would apply to buyers who want to store their purchases in private collections that cannot be easily accessible to the public. It’s “similar to if you want to buy a pack of cigarettes, which is meant to offset the harm that buying cigarettes does to society in general,” Roddy says. This strategy might be particularly effective for states with large auction houses such as New York.
Another option is to build any new, expanded fossil preservation laws from existing U.S. antiquities law, which are intended to preserve cultural heritage. After all, Roddy says, fossils aren’t just bones, but they’re also part of the human story. “Fossils have influenced our folklore; they’re a unifier of humanity and culture rather than a separate thing.”
Though fossils from private lands aren’t protected, many states do impose restrictions on searches for archaeological and cultural artifacts, by requiring those looking for antiquities to restore excavated land or by fining the excavation of certain antiquities without state permission. Expanding those restrictions to fossil hunting, perhaps by requiring state approval through permits, could also give states the opportunity to purchase any significant finds before they’re lost to private buyers.
Conservation of fossils: Science and the public
Such protections could be a huge boon to paleontologists, who may not even know what’s being lost. “The problem is, we’ll never know” all the fossils that are being sold, Sumida says. “They’re shutting scientists out of the conversation.”
And when it comes to dinosaurs, “so many of the species we know about are represented by a single fossil,” says Stephen Brusatte, a paleontologist at the University of Edinburgh. “If that fossil was never found, or disappeared into the vault of a collector, then we wouldn’t know about that dinosaur.”
Or, he says, sometimes a particularly complete or beautifully preserved dinosaur skeleton is found, and without it, “we wouldn’t be able to study what that dinosaur looked like, how it moved, what it ate, how it sensed its world, how it grew.”
The point isn’t to put restrictions on collecting fossils so much as making sure they remain in public view, Brusatte adds. “There’s nothing as magical as finding your own fossils, being the first person ever to see something that lived millions of years ago.” But, he says, unique and scientifically invaluable fossils such as dinosaur skeletons should be placed in museums “where they can be conserved and studied and inspire the public, rather than in the basements or yachts of the oligarch class.”
Stan disappeared for over a year after its record-breaking sale. Its new owners remain a mystery. In March 2022, news broke that Stan had been sold. The fossil was purchased by the United Arab EmiratesStan will be placed in a new museum of natural history, according to.
Sue is also open to the public. The fossil can be viewed at Chicago’s Field Museum of Natural HistoryThanks to the pooled financial resources provided by the Walt Disney Corporation and the McDonald’s Corporation, as well as the California State University System, others, this was possible. That’s the kind of money it took to get the highest bid on a T. rex25 years ago.
These prices seem to be increasing. Stan, possibly with Sue, was a lucky researcher.
As for Shen, the fossil’s fate remains in limbo: It was pulled from auction not due to outcry from paleontologists, but over concerns about intellectual property rights. Representatives of the Black Hills Institute of Geological Research, Hill City, S.D., suggested that the fossil was 54 percent complete and may have been enhanced with a polyurethane casting of Stan’s bones. Stan was discovered by this organization. They retain a copyright to the skeleton.
In response to those concerns, Christie’s pulled the lot, and now says that it intends to loan the fossil to a museum. But this move doesn’t reassure paleontologists. “A lot of people are pleased that the sale didn’t go through,” Sumida says. “But it sort of just kicks the can down the road.… It doesn’t mean they’re not going to try and sell it in another form, somewhere down the road.”
Ultimately, scientists simply can’t count on every important fossil finding its way to the public, Carr says. “Those fossils belong in a museum; it’s right out of Indiana Jones,” he says. “It’s not like they’re made in a factory somewhere. Fossils are not renewable resources. Once Shen is gone, it’s gone.”
