The Sotheby’s auction house has geared up for its biggest sale yet – a 67-million-year-old Tyrannosaurus rex skeleton. Dubbed Gus, the specimen is expected to fetch up to $30 million and will go to the highest bidder, whether it be a public museum or private collector.
Gus is billed as one of the largest and most complete T. rexes ever found, comprising 183 fossil bone elements making it approximately 61% complete by bone count. The fossil remains have been mounted in a custom steel armature along with replicas of the missing bones, posing the skeleton as if in hot pursuit of prey.
“It does seem to be a spectacular specimen,” says Thomas Holtz, a tyrannosaur specialist at the University of Maryland. “The completeness of the skeleton and the high quality of the bone make Gus scientifically significant.”
But while the sale of Gus may generate excitement among dinosaur enthusiasts, it has also raised concerns about the trend of private collectors buying fossils as luxury assets. Paleontologists argue that this trend is undermining science every step of the way.
The market for dinosaur fossils began to boom in earnest in 1997 when Sotheby’s auctioned Sue, the most complete T. rex on record. That specimen sold for roughly $8.4 million – the most money ever paid for a fossil at auction at the time.
“Before Sue was sold, there were no laws about who owned fossils,” says Cassandra Hatton, vice chairman and head of the science and natural history department at Sotheby’s. “There was no value truly ascribed to them.”
In many other countries, the state owns the fossils. But court cases around Sue clarified that in the US, whoever owns the land also owns whatever fossils are on it.
The market has been booming ever since, with ultrarich individuals snapping up dinosaur fossils at auctions for their private collections. Tech entrepreneur Dan O’Dowd owns a T. rex called Samson, and there are more fossils of T. rex in private collections than there are in public trusts.
“If a fossil is not excavated, it’s lost to everyone,” Hatton says. But paleontologists counter that the incentive to sell specimens to the highest bidder actively undermines science every step of the way.
That begins at excavation, with commercial outfits that take the fossils out of the ground but fail to exhaustively document the geological context in which a fossil was found. Mounting the bones for artistic display makes them impossible to study using modern techniques such as computed tomographic imaging.
Paleontologists also argue that auction firms play it fast and loose with science to market the fossils in a way that may make them more appealing to untrained buyers. In the case of Gus, Sotheby’s describes holes in the jaw and elsewhere on the specimen as tyrannosaurid bite marks – signs that Gus might have battled with or been scavenged by his own kind.
But according to Stuart Sumida, a paleontologist at California State University, San Bernardino, this interpretation is probably wrong. The holes are perfectly round and smooth-edged, whereas puncture marks are irregularly shaped and have splintered fractures around the edges.
“It’s much sexier to say they’re puncture wounds, but this isn’t how puncture wounds look,” Sumida says. “T. rex probably just had really bad breath.”
Source: Original article