Two weeks ago, auctioneer Phyllis Kao, in a tailored gray jacket and hair pinned in a black swirl at her forehead, leaned with tensile agility over the rostrum. Her eyes trained intently on the row of Sotheby’s representatives whispering to their bidders on the phone.
She was guiding the sale of lot 13, also known as Apex, a stegosaurus skeleton the auction house touted as “likely the most complete, probably the most important ever to be uncovered.”
The bidding was stuck at $13m. “I’ll give you some time,” Kao told her bidders’ representatives wryly. “Give it a think.”
When the sale again picked up momentum, it took the seven bidders just a few minutes to hit $25m. “Stay with it,” she encouraged them. By $38.5m, Kao said, “they’re just numbers at this point,” to laughter from the crowd.
Apex on display at Sotheby’s in New York last month. (Photo by Alexi Rosenfeld/Getty Images)
Andre Lajun cradled his laptop from a hotel room in Medicine Bow, Wyoming. He was away on a dig, and came into town to view the auction. He watched in shock as the hammer came down at $40m. And then he picked up the phone and called Jason Cooper, the commercial paleontologist who’d just hit paydirt.
To his surprise, Cooper answered. The pair were longtime friends and former business partners, united by their passion for discovery, dinosaurs, and the feast and famine lifestyle of commercial paleontology.
“It was just pure joy to know that every sacrifice, every bad situation, every falling out with a business partner or employee, all the hard times that we go through… I just reminded him that it was all worth it,” says Lujan, president of the Association of Applied Paleontological Sciences, a group that represents commercial hunters who don’t have scientific background.
“I just reminded him that he deserves this and I’m so happy for him.”
Not everyone felt that way.
As more money flows into the fossil market, public institutions are getting increasingly boxed out, leaving the study of ancient specimens in the hands of the billionaires who can afford to buy the bones.
As the prices of fossils get higher, so do the stakes — and the possibility they’ll be lost to the public. Apex’s auction has reignited a long-roiling debate at the bedrock of fossil discovery. On one side stand commercial hunters and ranchers who extoll the virtues of property ownership and the free market, and argue scientists disdain them because they don’t have PhDs like they do. On the other are academics who say that fossil hunters are in it for the money, and when a skeleton is sold, its contribution to science turns to dust.
Fossils like Apex are caught in the middle.
Science says
Across the country, in California, Dr. Stuart Sumida had a wildly different emotional reaction to Apex.
He was distressed. Another specimen gone, another burst of attention that distracts from the importance of careful study and science.
For Sumida, biology professor at the California State University, San Bernardino and the vice-president of the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology, Apex represents an opportunity lost.
“You don’t study a specimen that’s already been plastered together,” he says. “You study the parts, sometimes at the microscopic level.”
Sumida and the SVP have lobbied for years for stronger regulations against commercial fossil hunting and selling. Scientific journals won’t publish papers on fossils sold on the private market, because other scientists can’t vet the data. The U.S. is one of the only countries in the world that allows international export of fossils, opening them up to collectors across the world.
And while the commercialization of fossils gets likened to the art market, there's a critical difference: humans didn’t make them.
“You would never sell a coastal redwood tree,” he says.
Stuart Sumida, biology professor at California State University San Bernardino, argues a fossil sold on the private market is lost to science. (Photo by Irfan Khan/Los Angeles Times via Getty Images)
“The bigger question becomes, who gets to own history?”
A bone rush
Thirty years ago, the Chicago Tribune deemed selling fossils a growth industry.
“Sadly, these resources, which mean so much to science if properly investigated, are being ripped out of the ground by people who see them not as the gateway to knowledge but as mere trophies,” Michael Woodbourne, a University of California, Riverside paleontologist, told the paper at the time.
Commercial paleontologists argued there was nothing wrong with selling fossils found on private property.
Hollywood stars like Leonardo DiCaprio and Nicolas Cage began to collect them, bidding against each other in auctions and filling their homes with specimen skulls.
And then came Sue.
A visitor poses for a selfie with Sue at the Field Museum in Chicago. (Photo by Joel Lerner/Xinhua via Getty Images)
A 67m-year-old T-rex discovered by Peter Larson in South Dakota, Sue sold for a staggering $8.4m in 1997.
“The day Sue got auctioned is the day fossils became money,” Kirk Johnson, director of the Natural Museum of Natural History at Smithsonian, told The New Yorker years later.
(The sale, an unprecedented collaboration between Chicago’s Field Museum, Walt Disney and McDonalds came about over a happy meal. McDonalds wanted to create a happy meal toy of Sue, but was locked into an agreement with Disney that said it could only include its cartoon characters. They partnered to fund the purchase — and the eventual happy-meal-ification.)
Disney helped pay for the skeleton’s purchase, the original parts went to the Field Museum, and a cast of Sue now stands at Disney World.
Scientists were furious, fearful it would send the price of fossils skyrocketing and edge out exploration for the public good. Commercial hunters said support from private buyers would help get more fossils out of the ground.
It would take 23 years for another T-rex to hit the market in the same way. In 2020, Stan, also discovered by Larson, sold for $31.8m. And while hundreds of Stan casts, or replicas, are displayed in homes and museums across the world, the original skeleton now belongs to a buyer in Dubai.
“People say, this should be part of the free market. Education and science should not only be for the rich,” Sumida says.
The Hustle
Last year, even Joe Rogan got in on the craze when a guest on his show declared “I’m going to start a bone rush.” The guest, a private collector named John Reeves, said wooly mammoth bones lined the floor of the East River in Manhattan, and promised riches there for the taking to anyone adventurous enough to go find them. (His proclamation led to many dives and no bones.)
The oldest crop
In 2009, the government struck a compromise, outlawing the selling of fossils dug up on public lands. On private lands, like the 100-acre ranch in Dinosaur, Colorado, where Jason Cooper found Apex on a birthday stroll in May 2022, anything goes.
Commercial hunters now make deals with ranchers in dinosaur country, cutting them into potential profits by anywhere from 10%-50% to get their permission to dig. Others live by a code of ethics, making sure to offer scientifically valuable specimens to universities or museums first.
Scientists counter that that means landowners now expect money for access to their property, so it shuts out hundreds of thousands of acres of land to research.
The Hustle
For Lujan, at 41 years old, married with kids, he’s no longer in the treasure hunting business. It’s too precarious. It’s not uncommon for hunters to walk for miles, months, even years, looking for their next big find. “Most of those people are living on credit, borrowing from people, it gets you into a bad situation,” he says.
“If you’re just out there on a hope and a dream, man, that’s not a world I’d want to live in.”
Instead, he works with museums and other institutions, excavating, mounting, casting, and consulting.
To run a dig:
With a five-person crew, it’ll run you between $2.5k and $3.5k/week, to feed, house and move people, plus materials like plaster, burlap, glue and fuel. To get some fossils out of the ground can take years
Mounting a skeleton can cost upwards of $300k, depending on materials
A Triceratops-sized dinosaur can take 20k hours of work, from ground to museum
Lujan says museums have always depended on commercial paleontology for discoveries and donations. “It’s the mistress of academia — everybody knows about it but nobody talks about it.”
While museums initially resisted working with commercial fossil hunters, many eventually determined they didn’t have much of a choice.
Today, some maintain a hardline “we’re not paying for specimens” approach, but others try to raise the money to participate in auctions or bid on finds privately. Many also accept donations or loans from private buyers, as Apex’s new owner billionaire hedge funder Ken Griffin intends to do.
Still, the debate over whether fossils have a place decorating the mantle pieces (or entire first floor, in Apex’s case) of billionaires rages on.
“Can you imagine if we did that for the Declaration of Independence?” says Kevin Padian, curator emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley’s Museum of Paleontology. “Do we have other stegosaurus on display in the world? Yeah, we do. We have other Rembrandts in the world, other Van Goghs. Does that mean finding a new one doesn’t illuminate us?”
A maturing market
For Mike Triebold, a commercial fossil hunter who’s been in the business for 35 years, he’s seen the price of fossils steadily rising over the last ten years. He attributes that to a maturing of the market.
“In the ‘80s and ‘90s, it was cowboys and speculators with poor preparation technique, amateur mounting armatures and day jobs who sold dinosaurs, and buyers who just wanted that toothy dinosaur for their corporate office or den.”
The Tucson Gem, Mineral and Fossil show, which ran during Covid with some on-brand direction for participants, is one of the most prominent fossil markets in the U.S. (Photo by Wild Horizons/Universal Images Group via Getty Images)
Today, he says, the market is largely driven by sellers who believe in the advancement of science — through a lens of free enterprise. And while buyers today still spend to display a skeleton in their foyer, a hotel, a casino, or a shopping mall, there are others like Griffin who buy with an eye to donating to a museum. It doesn’t necessarily advance research – and there’s no measure in place to ensure they follow through on such a promise – but it does encourage more people to fall in love with dinosaurs.
“Paleontology is about the closest you can get to time travel,” Triebold says.
And dinosaurs as a gateway to falling in love with science, with treasures of the earth more broadly, is something both sides can agree has value.
“They should be for everyone,” Sumida says. It’s how they make it there that might take millennia to resolve.
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