On the rise, the dinosaur bone market moves millions of dollars

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Crouched over a snow-covered quarry, which is also an area where many people look for fossils, Peter Larson pointed to a four-inch-thick slab protruding above the layer of snow. To the untrained eye it looked like any other stone, but to Larson it was clear that it was a dinosaur bone.

“This is about 145 million years old,” said Larson, 70, who is an expert and dealer in fossils. He was touring an excavation site that had already yielded the remains of seven dinosaurs.

Hulett is a breeding ground for the current bone hunting craze. It is very possible that there are more buried dinosaurs than humans in the city of 309 inhabitants.

Larson has been excavating in the region for over 20 years, starting shortly after Sue, as a fossil of tyrannosaurus rex that he helped excavate sold at auction for $8.4 million in 1997, ushering in a boom in the market for ancient bones.

A wave of amateur diggers headed to the fossil-rich mountains, and local landowners began to think about “farming a new species”: dinosaur skeletons.

Among them were Elaine and Leslie Waugh, who raised sheep on their farm in Wyoming, a short distance from Devils Tower National Monument, but began to wonder what they should do about the dinosaur fossils they kept finding in the earth.

“We decided we had to do something with the bones,” said Leslie Waugh, 93. They reached out to Larson.

Larson’s company had put years of painstaking work into excavating bones including Camarasaurus, Barosaurus and Brachiosaurus.

The search for fossils has become a multi-million dollar business, a fact that does not please academic paleontologists, who fear that specimens of scientific interest are being sold to the highest bidder.

The record value achieved by Sue was surpassed by Stan, another Tyrannosaurus rex excavated by Larson’s company and which Christie’s sold at auction in 2020 for $31.8 million.

This year, a Deinonychus bone (which inspired the velociraptors depicted in the movie “Jurassic Park”) fetched $12.4 million at auction and a Gorgosaurus $6.1 million, while Sotheby’s auction house sold a single tooth. in T. rex for over $100,000.

In December, it is estimated that a skull of T. rex will be sold for between 15 and 20 million dollars.

Buyers of dinosaur fossils include financiers, Hollywood stars, tech industry leaders and a whole crop of natural history museums in China and the Middle East that are new or expanding.

Christie’s had hoped to hold yet another highly lucrative auction of a dinosaur fossil this month, predicting that a skeleton of T. rex called Shen would be sold for between 15 million and 25 million dollars. But the Hong Kong auction was canceled this week, just 10 days short of its scheduled date, after Larson and other experts raised questions about the specimen and how it was being put up for sale.

Larson, who seems to be involved in most of the drama in the dinosaur world these days, was studying a photo of Shen when he noticed that it looked familiar: the skull was very similar to Stan’s. “The scars on Stan’s face are still there, the teeth are in the same position,” Larson said.

His company, the Black Hills Institute of Geological Research, owns Stan’s intellectual property rights and sells polyurethane molds of the specimen for $120,000 each.

After a company lawyer raised the issue in emails and phone calls, Christie’s modified its online publicity materials to highlight that Shen had been supplemented with replicas of Stan’s bones.

On the last 20th, Christie’s removed Shen from the auction, announcing that it will study the matter further.

Peter Larson is either a famous fossil expert or an infamous expert, depending on how you look at the booming bone market.

He has been a central figure in launching dinosaurs onto the auction market, and his nearly 50-year career has been marred by court disputes over fossils, an 18-month stint in federal prison after he was convicted of infractions. customs involving international fossil deals, a contentious dispute with his brother over their fossil business, and now a dispute with an auction house.

Larson said things were simpler earlier in his career, when universities, museums and a smaller group of private collectors were the only ones who bothered to buy pieces of natural history.

It was only in 1997, with Sue’s sale, that dinosaurs began to be seen as potential objects of central interest at auctions.

But putting Sue up for sale wasn’t part of Larson’s plan.

One tyrannosaurus rex called Sue

Driving back from the fossil quarry in Wyoming, Larson recalled losing Sue.

Troubles began in 1992, when Larson stepped out of the shower to find access to his Hill City, South Dakota fossil company blocked off with yellow tape and swarming with FBI agents. They filed a search warrant demanding that the institute hand over Sue, known at the time as the largest specimen of T. rex already found.

The skeleton had been discovered two years earlier by Sue Hendrickson, then a volunteer digger, who had stumbled upon bones on the side of a cliff on the Cheyenne River Preserve. When the Black Hills team, which included Peter Larson and his brother, Neal Larson, completed Sue’s excavation, they handed land owner Maurice Williams a check for $5,000.

But the American government claimed that Sue belonged to it because it would be trustee of the land where the skeleton was found. And Maurice Williams said there was never an agreement for the fossil company to buy Sue. He disputed that the $5,000 check was payment for the fossil, saying he thought it was payment for access to the land.

Peter Larson’s company sued the government to ask for Sue’s return. An appeals court eventually ruled against the company and Williams was allowed to offer the skeleton at auction, in a sale brokered by Sotheby’s, which described it as “a highly important and virtually complete fossil skeleton”.

The winning bid was made by the Field Museum of Natural History, Chicago, with sponsorship from Disney and McDonald’s. That sale transformed the entire industry.

In an effort to crack down on the fossil trade, the federal government charged Larson and his colleagues with a flurry of fossil-related offenses unrelated to Sue’s dig.

In 1995, Larson was convicted of two criminal customs offenses involving failure to declare values ​​connected with fossil transactions. He served 18 months of a two-year prison sentence. While incarcerated, he lectured on fossils as part of a lecture series.

In 2000, as Larson prepared to convert the Waugh Quarry into a dig site, Sue began showing at the Field Museum, and her 270-pound skull became a symbol of the growing public fascination with dinosaurs.

Stan breaks records

If Larson had succeeded, Stan, his company’s great discovery after Sue, would have remained on display forever in his company’s museum in Hill City, the former gold prospector settlement near Mount Rushmore that attracts visitors every year. tourists and bikers to the Sturgis motorcycle rally.

Stan was discovered by an amateur paleontologist named Stan Sacrison. The Black Hills Institute began the excavation in 1992, using jackhammers, shovels and pickaxes to extract the skeleton from a mound in northwestern South Dakota. The following year, as the company continued to work on the skeleton, the movie “Jurassic Park” opened in theaters, fueling popular interest in dinosaurs.

After Black Hill Institute lost Sue, Stan became their greatest pride. The fossil toured Japan like a rock star. Casts of the skeleton have been purchased by museums around the world. And because the specimen contained so many original bones —190—, Stan lent itself to being the subject of scientific study.

However, as with Sue, the sale of Stan turned out to be the resolution of a protracted dispute in court.

In 2015 Neal Larson filed a lawsuit against his brother Peter and other Black Hills Institute officials, claiming he had been illegally fired from the company’s board of directors. A judge ruled in his favor. Peter Larson said that the company’s then-lawyer came up with the idea of ​​offering Stan to Neal Larson in exchange for his stake in the company. No one at the time understood exactly how valuable the fossil would turn out to be.

In 2020, the 12-meter-long fossil began to be displayed behind the showcase that covers an entire wall at Christie’s headquarters in Manhattan. Stan sold at auction that year for $31.8 million — a record for a fossil, nearly four times the auction house’s highest estimate. This year, National Geographic informed that the specimen will be exhibited in a natural history museum that is being created in the United Arab Emirates.

“For a fossil to be sold for so much money was a shock,” commented paleontologist Steve Brusatte of the University of Edinburgh.

Out of financial reach of scientists

Many scientists are horrified by the growing commercial market and fear that scientifically important specimens disappear into private mansions. Paleontologists also worry that the market could encourage illegal digging and that landowners in the US — who by law generally own fossils found on their land — will favor commercial fossil hunters over academic researchers.

“Farmers who in the past let us onto their land and look for specimens now wonder why they should let us take the specimens for free,” commented paleontologist Jingmai O’Connor of the Field Museum, “when a commercial collector would dig up the bones and split the profit with them”.

Commercial fossil hunters and dealers retort that, were it not for them, specimens on private land would remain where they are, erode further and never be found.

The United States is a legal exception. In other countries rich in dinosaur fossils, including Mongolia and Canada, legislation provides that fossils belong to the government. Paleontologist Thomas Carr of Carthage College in Wisconsin thinks that the lack of “natural heritage” protections puts American scientists at a disadvantage.

Peter Larson does not have advanced academic qualifications. He says he started to pursue a doctorate in paleontology, but dropped out due to his growing lawyer bills and the lingering effects of the Great Recession. For him, the fact that the wider public is valuing fossils, which he has been fascinated with since he was four years old, is a positive thing.

“We should be happy that fossils are being appreciated as works of art,” Larson said. Minutes before Stan went up for auction, a painting by Mark Rothko had fetched $31.3 million, half a million dollars less than the fossil.

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