The first thing to remember about dinosaurs is that they tend to be bigger than you think. “I should have checked,” says Carla Nizzola, the elegant, jeans-wearing, 36-year-old director of Extraordinary Objects. But by the time she thought to wonder about the width of her doorway, her impulse buy — a 68-million-year-old triceratops head — was already on its way across the Atlantic.
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When the van arrived outside her gallery in Cambridge last summer, it took five men to get the head to the door, but no further. “I thought we were going to have to demolish something,” Nizzola says. “But . . . well, where there’s a will, there’s a way.” Painfully slowly, with several heartstopping moments, the new exhibit — nicknamed Tracey — was wiggled indoors.
I shouldn’t think many people meet Tracey without wanting to touch her. She’s only a half-skull, glued together from fragments, yet there’s something mesmerisingly solid about her. She’s 7ft from nose to frill, heavy as cathedral limestone, and, notwithstanding her lined and pitted surface, smooth as driftwood. The closer you peer, the more your neck tingles. All those millions of years, and the skull still glows with structural integrity, each curve, cavity and point flowing naturally from the whole.
Would she shatter, like a Jeff Koons dog, if I accidentally knocked her off the stand? You don’t want to risk it: not with a £125,000 price tag. Yet this, it turns out, is a bargain by recent standards. Sotheby’s sold a complete triceratops skull in New York last April for $504,000. Six months earlier, a triceratops skeleton, skull and all, was sold by Binoche et Giquello in Paris for €6.65 million. And that’s just a triceratops, a harmless herbivore. If you’re looking for a statement predator — a Tyrannosaurus rex, say — a fossilised skeleton could cost you tens of millions.
Has the collecting world gone stone-cold crazy? Far from it, says James Hyslop, head of scientific instruments, globes and natural history at Christie’s in London. “If you go back to the early 20th century, when all those big, famous species like T. rex or triceratops were discovered, the prices paid by the big American and European museums for those specimens were almost on a par with the top paintings in the world.” Yet today’s market is, he concedes, buoyant to the point of exuberance. “When I joined Christie’s, in 2007, the going rate for a triceratops was about half a million dollars. Now it’s $6 million. Yet if you look at where the most expensive fossils are today versus the most expensive paintings, we’re still a long way from Peak Dinosaur.”
Prices have been rising steadily since the late Nineties. Some blame Steven Spielberg’s Jurassic Park, released in 1993. A more specific catalyst was an auction in New York in October 1997. A 65-million-year-old T. rex skeleton, nicknamed Sue after the fossil hunter who found it in western South Dakota, went up for sale at Sotheby’s. Nine bidders did battle for nine frenzied minutes. Chicago’s Field Museum of Natural History came out on top, with a winning bid of $8.36 million.
That bid, made possible by financial backing from Disney and McDonald’s, shook the fossil world, and another tyrannosaurus auction three years later — on eBay, with an asking price of $8 million — reinforced the sense of a new going rate (even though that specimen ended up being sold privately, almost certainly for much less). Every prospector, every dealer, every collector, every auctioneer — everyone involved now knew that, potentially, the right dinosaur fossil could generate riches out of all proportion to the (not-inconsiderable) cost of getting it out of the ground. That kind of knowledge never goes back in the bottle.
The buzz attracted unexpected enthusiasts. Russell Crowe, Leonardo DiCaprio and Nicolas Cage acquired dinosaur fossils. Opportunist suppliers rushed to source specimens from all over the world, some with more regard than others for procedural niceties. A few people got their fingers burnt: Cage (outbidding DiCaprio) paid $276,000 for the skull of a Tarbosaurus bataar in 2007 but agreed eight years later to give it back, after it emerged that it had been exported illegally from Mongolia. (All exports of fossil material from Mongolia are illegal.) In 2012, meanwhile, the respected British fossil hunter Chris Moore — who runs a small fossil shop in Charmouth, Dorset — voluntarily returned several crates of material to Mongolia after becoming involved as a middleman in a scheme to import fossil material to the US via China and the UK. The scheme’s US mastermind, Eric Prokopi, was later jailed for making false customs declarations. (Moore, however, had broken no laws: you can import fossils from wherever you like, as long as you declare them correctly.)
Prokopi’s activities made headlines after representatives of the Mongolian government tried to interrupt an auction in Chelsea, New York, at which one of Prokopi’s imports, a T. bataar skeleton, was briefly sold for $1.1 million. The specimen was later impounded and in due course returned to its land of origin. The scandal could have shaken market confidence. Instead, prices have soared.
In October 2020 another T. rex from South Dakota, marginally more complete than Sue but not spectacularly so, was sold at Christie’s New York for $31.8 million. The anonymous purchaser has never been identified, although Stan, as this specimen was nicknamed, has since been seen in Abu Dhabi, where it is due to be displayed in a new museum on Saadiyat Island from 2025.
Then, last May, Christie’s sold a 110-million-year-old Deinonychus antirrhopus skeleton (Hector), much smaller than Stan and less complete, for $12.4 million. One leading palaeontologist, Steve Brusatte at the University of Edinburgh, described the price as “deranged”.
“The international art market has only recently woken up to this category,” Hyslop says — and sellers are increasingly targeting that market. The record-breaking sale of Stan, for example, was the culmination of a 20th Century Evening Sale at Christie’s, in which multimillion-dollar works by Cézanne, Van Gogh, Picasso, Rothko and Jackson Pollock were also auctioned; and when Sotheby’s sold a T. rex skull for $6.1 million in December, it was part of its New York Luxury Week.
In London, meanwhile, high-value dinosaur fossils (including a £1 million camptosaurus skeleton) have been sold at the Frieze London and Masterpiece art fairs, often by dealers — such as Salomon Aaron of David Aaron Gallery — usually associated with fine art and antiquities. There’s an obvious logic to this. Many fossils have a powerfully sculptural quality, and, says Aaron, standing between a juvenile triceratops skull (£650,000) and a small but vicious-looking othnielosaurus (price on application) in his elegantly minimalist Berkeley Square gallery, “just because something isn’t man-made doesn’t mean it can’t be beautiful to look at”.
“Some specimens really do speak to the soul,” Hyslop says. But big dinosaurs also send a powerful message about their owner. It’s like having your own Monet or Rothko, but more assertive. “You don’t have to explain anything,” says Cassandra Hatton, global head of science and popular culture at Sotheby’s. “Somebody can come into your home and just go, ‘Wow!’ ”
Prices reflect many things: rarity, completeness, size. But it’s the “Wow!” factor that matters most these days, because that’s what the big spenders want.
Hatton lures them to her sales with an umbrella brief that includes fossils, meteorites, movie and hip-hop memorabilia, space travel collectibles, medical curios, old computers, rare books, Nobel prize medals — often in the same auction. Sales she takes pride in include $2.8 million for the jacket Buzz Aldrin wore to the moon and back, $6.1 million for a gorgosaurus, and $5.4 million for the source code for the World Wide Web (as a non-fungible token).
This cocktail of tastes is more widely shared than you might expect. At Extraordinary Objects in Cambridge, for example, fossils like Tracey can be viewed (or purchased) alongside artworks by Banksy, Grayson Perry, Gilbert & George and the like. On a grander scale, in Italy, visitors invited to Theatrum Mundi, in Arezzo, can marvel at creatively displayed dinosaurs — an allosaurus and a diplodocus “fighting” — in an exotic setting that also features space-race curios (a Soviet spacesuit), Hollywood memorabilia (an original Star Wars lightsaber), rare books, paintings and anthropological oddities.
Such collections draw on the tradition of cabinets of wonders. But the real attraction is the chance to amaze guests and leave them speechless
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Such collections draw on the tradition of “Wunderkammern” — cabinets of wonders — that were fashionable in the enlightened courts of 16th and 17th-century Europe. Their ostensible purpose was to bring an understanding of the wider world to the court: “Thus your Excellency shall have added depth of knowledge to the fineness of your spirits and greatness of your power” (as Francis Bacon put it). But the real attraction, then as now, was the chance (in the words of Theatrum Mundi’s founder, Luca Cableri) to “amaze guests and leave them speechless”.
A similar mash-up of categories can be found at another invitation-only gallery, Wunderkammer Zürich, whose founder, Christian D Link, also organises an annual Out of This World sale at Koller, Switzerland’s biggest auction house. The latest, last month, was a feast of “wonders”: fossils, meteorites, precious stones, space travel “relics”, Hollywood memorabilia, stuffed birds, ancient Egyptian sarcophagus masks, a bicycle once ridden by Eddy Merckx. The highlight was a much-hyped T. rex skeleton, TRX-293 Trinity, which sold for a slightly disappointing CHF4.8 million, no doubt reflecting the fact that it was a composite of three specimens.
Link is a former professional magician, which may explain the air of mystery with which he fails to tell me much about how TRX-293 came into his hands. “A guy I know, he knows a guy . . . He asked me, do you want a T. rex?” The specimen “was meant to go to an exhibition, but they had some issues”; the seller was “a private individual who decided to part with it”; the middleman was “a European”. In the auction business, Link explains, “discretion is everything”.
But there is no disguising his belief that the wonders of natural history are there to be collected and marvelled at. “I was always fascinated by the idea of creating your own worlds, made of objects,” he says. This aesthetically led approach does not endear him to the significant number of palaeontologists who believe that, actually, dinosaur fossils are there to be studied. The US Society of Vertebrate Paleontology (SVP), which represents more than 200 palaeontologists worldwide, has called (in vain) for several recent dinosaur auctions to be stopped, or at least “restricted to bidders from institutions committed to curating specimens for the public good and in perpetuity”. Selling such specimens into private hands, in its view, results in them being “potentially lost to science”.
Hyslop plays down such concerns. “Most collectors want to share their specimens with the world,” he says, and Christie’s has often facilitated loan arrangements between purchaser and museum. Yet American palaeontologists, in particular, are reluctant to work with privately owned specimens and peer-reviewed journals rarely publish such work, because, as the SVP puts it, “future access cannot be guaranteed” and “the essence of science is replicability”. One American professor, Kenshu Shimada of DePaul University in Illinois, has described the commercialisation of fossil-collecting as “the greatest threat to palaeontology in the 21st century”. Another, Thomas Carr of Carthage College in Kenosha, Wisconsin, has compared selling to private collectors to burning books.
Others take a more nuanced view. “Dinosaurs are awesome,” Brusatte says. “I totally get why you might want your own. The problem is where there’s a very scientifically valuable, rare, one-of-a-kind fossil, and that fossil is sold off to somebody and disappears from public view. I know of specimens that have basically disappeared.” Examples might include the $12.4 million deinonychus sold by Christie’s and the $6.1 million gorgosaurus sold by Sotheby’s last year. For all that most of us know about their whereabouts, they might as well be back in the ground. “That’s a loss to science,” Brusatte says. “It’s a loss to education. It’s a loss to the public. We don’t know if we’ll ever know where they are.”
Yet the issue is not clear-cut. Some privately owned dinosaurs have been lent to museums with great success. Tristan Otto, the vast T. rex skeleton that’s the prize exhibit at the Museum für Naturkunde in Berlin, is the property of the London-based Danish financier Niels Nielsen and his friend Jens Peter Jenssen. Arkhane, the allosaurus displayed in recent years at the Institut Royal des Sciences Naturelles de Belgique in Brussels, belongs to a French fund manager who bought him at auction in Paris in 2018. And Big John, a giant triceratops that used to be cited as “lost” after being sold to an anonymous American for €6.65 million by Binoche et Giquello in Paris in 2021, recently turned up in Florida, where its new owner, Siddhartha Pagidipati, is lending it to the Glazer Children’s Museum in Tampa for a three-year exhibition.
Dan O’Dowd, a US tech billionaire who owns a T. rex called Samson, thinks the academic enemies of private collecting are “ridiculous”. He would be delighted for scientists to study Samson, “but they say, ‘No, we can’t look at it’.” And yet, O’Dowd points out, “That’s how these things get found. We don’t find them because, you know, PhDs are scrambling around in holes in South Dakota looking for bones. They’re almost all found by private collectors and fossil hunters who go out and find them. These guys are doing it for money.”
“We must guard against hypocrisy,” Professor Paul Barrett, at the Natural History Museum in London, says. “Almost every major museum collection in the world is based on specimens that that museum has bought from a commercial dealer” — while others, including the Natural History Museum’s, have grown from specimens donated by private collectors.
What’s harder to dismiss is the worry that, as Brusatte puts it, “once people hear about these high price tags, that puts dollar signs in their eyes”. Last year, the Malta-registered Apeiron Investment Group was reported to have launched a Jurassic Fund One, with the purpose of investing in excavations and buying the resulting specimens “like real estate”. In fact, Apeiron decided not to go ahead with the fund; but the mindset behind it persists. “Dinosaur fossils are the ultimate collectible,” says Christian Angermayer, Apeiron’s German founder, who personally owns a tyrannosaurus, a diplodocus and a triceratops skull. They have a great track record as investments too. Just look at the going rate for a triceratops, up 1,200 per cent in 15 years.
But, Aaron says, “indiscriminate price rises aren’t in the interests of a sustainable market. We want discriminate price increases, for things that warrant it.” The trouble is, the higher the expected returns, the stronger the temptation to cut corners. Last November Christie’s hastily withdrew a tyrannosaurus skeleton from an auction in Hong Kong, days before bidding commenced. Known as Shen, the specimen was expected to fetch $15 million to $25 million. Then doubts were expressed about what proportion of the bones were replicas. A few days later, another tyrannosaurus, Ryker, was abruptly pulled from a planned exhibition at the Musée des Confluences in Lyons, pending “further research”. The full facts of both episodes have yet to emerge. But there are, warns Nielsen, “a lot of bad actors in this space”.
And even the good actors can suffer in the ruthless scramble. Terry Ciotka, the Canadian dealer who sold Nielsen the tyrannosaurus now known as Tristan Otto, ended up on the receiving end of a speculative lawsuit — claiming a share of the proceeds — that took years to defeat. And Peter Larson, the Dakota fossil hunter whose Black Hills Institute unearthed Sue and Stan, faced lawsuits in connection with both specimens — and missed out on most of their record-breaking proceeds.
Yet the market seems unfazed by the threat of litigation or scandal. “You just have to do your due diligence,” Hyslop says. That means making sure that each stage of your target specimen’s journey from the ground to saleroom was fully compliant with the laws of its land of origin. Anything from Mongolia, China and Canada is a non-starter; the US, on the other hand, produces clear, reliable paper trails of ownership — and a steady stream of big, exciting specimens from its western states. “A huge part of what I do is just mountains of paperwork,” Hatton says. “You know, land title documents, title transfer agreements, copies of every export licence . . .”
When the provenance is watertight, a top-of-the-range dinosaur is one of the more sober “investments of passion”. It’s low maintenance (“They’re just stones,” O’Dowd says). It holds its value well compared with other luxuries. It can even be good for business.
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Kléber Rossillon, the French heritage tycoon, displays his 150-million-year-old allosaurus (bought for €1.13 million in 2016) as a visitor attraction at the Jardins de Marqueyssac, one of 12 historic sites his company manages. Next stop, some suspect, may be the wholly corporate dinosaur, purchased to project the brand — like the €548,250 mammoth skeleton with which Soprema, the waterproofing group, celebrates its mammoth logo at its Strasbourg HQ.
O’Dowd keeps Samson at the Santa Barbara HQ of his company, Green Hills Software. Only the skull of the tyrannosaurus is on display: the lobby isn’t big enough for the rest. Even so, he says, “it’s a great talking point. And it’s pretty impressive.”
He bought his trophy dinosaur during the 2008-09 financial crisis. “I read that it was up for auction in Las Vegas, for about $8 million, but it didn’t sell. So I called Bonhams.” It turned out that the specimen had been used as collateral for a property deal and the bank had foreclosed. “The bank didn’t want to wait for the best price. They just wanted cash by the end of the week.” He has been savouring his rock-bottom purchase ever since. “It was a really good deal,” he purrs.
Perhaps the present turmoil in the banking sector will produce comparable bargains — although you’ll need a lot of ready cash to profit from them. But the great thing about natural history is that its wonders come in many sizes. At Christie’s Sculpted by Nature online auction, for example, you have until May 24 to bid for anything from charming gogotte formations for a few thousand pounds to a new genus of pterosaur (estimate: about £100,000) or a “sculptural” triceratops skull (£300,000-£500,000). Or for the biggest spenders, there’s said to be something more showstopping coming up at Sotheby’s, New York, in July. But whatever your budget, you’re unlikely to see the value of your purchase go down. “There are very few things that I think will be super-valuable in future and aren’t susceptible to trends,” Hatton says. “But I think dinosaurs are one of them.”
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The world's most famous paleontologist doesn't understand why anyone wants to collect dinosaurs. Mark Norell sits across from me in his expansive corner office at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City and launches right in: "People are weird. I think, 'Who is buying this?'"
I first heard about private dinosaur collecting in 2007, when the actors Leonardo DiCaprio and Nicolas Cage engaged in a bidding war over a 32-inch Tyrannosaurus bataar skull at an auction in Beverly Hills. In the end, Cage outbid his rival with a $276,000 offer. (Just before Christmas 2015, Cage returned it on an order from the Department of Homeland Security; unbeknownst to him, he had bought a dinosaur part smuggled out of Mongolia.)
Since that auction, I perk up whenever I see news about any other big-name dinosaur collectors: the film directors James Cameron and Ron Howard; actor Brad Pitt; and Nathan Myhrvold, Microsoft's former chief technology officer, who according to Men's Journal has a Tyrannosaurus rex skeleton in a glass solarium in his large home in Bellevue, Washington. Various high-flying sheikhs are in on the pastime, too. Former U.S. House Speaker Newt Gingrich kept a T. rex skull cast in his office.
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As I read more about this current crop of rich male (always male, it seems) collectors, I gave them their own species name: Abundus egocentrus. I tried to understand their motivation. Was having a big vicious dinosaur on display akin to owning a huge scary dog like a Rottweiler? Were they saying to the world, "Look what I can tame!" Or maybe there were deeper psychological implications. Did collecting dinosaur fossils tap into childhood issues, delivering a soothing narrative about where we came from?
My first step for getting answers was to talk to the person Time magazine nicknamed "Dino Man." Who better to explain the mindset of those amassing dinosaur bones than the man who oversees the dinosaurs that attract 5 million visitors a year?
Norell, 58, surprisingly chatty and undeniably hip, is chairman of the museum's Division of Paleontology. He's best known for excavating dinosaurs sitting on nests, baby dino embryos fossilized beneath their haunches, not to mention his storied work on feathered theropods. Just back from a fossil tour of China, Norell was getting ready to go out in the field again, somewhere in the Gobi Desert.
In preparation, I had swiftly transformed myself into a walking version of The Complete Idiot's Guide to Dinosaurs and the relatively brief history of humans collecting their bones. In the 1870s, a fossil-collecting frenzy that had sprung up in Great Britain spread across the pond and found its way westward into northern Wyoming. There, an extreme rivalry brewed between two titans of early U.S. paleontology: Edward Drinker Cope and Othniel Charles Marsh. Historians refer to their long, ugly feud, which saw them jostling for scientific supremacy and using underhanded methods to discredit each other, as the Bone Wars. Despite their enmity, between them they'd named 136 dinosaur species by 1892.
The collecting mania in the U.S. intensified again at the tail end of the 19th century. On Dec. 11, 1898, The New York Journal and Advertiser ran a headline that caught the fancy of many, including the philanthropist Andrew Carnegie: "Most Colossal Animal Ever on Earth Just Found Out West." The titillating copy featured a Brontosaurus giganteus peering into the New York Life building to illustrate the size of the find. It was not a factual story — only a single leg bone was found, in Laramie, Wyoming — but the filthy-rich Carnegie was now longing for a dinosaur of his own. He financed great discoveries, including 'Dippy' (Diplodocus carnegii), composed of bones unearthed along Sheep Creek in Wyoming, and a startlingly large dinosaur that he named for his wife (Apatosaurus louisae), pieced together from finds in his private quarry in Vernal, Utah.
In Norell's view, dinosaur collectors today are not merely harmless science wannabes. They cause serious saurus tsuris for those in the museum world. "Prices have ballooned for finds on private land. Museums don't have the funds to compete with the actors and hedge-fund guys. If there is a great amateur discovery, don't you think it should advance science?" He also pooh-poohs reports that you can make a fortune in dinosaurs, because, as he puts it, you can always get more for a Seurat than for a Stegosaurus. "And keep in mind they are incredibly not liquid. You can't say, 'Oh, I need some money, I'm going to sell my Bambiraptor.'"
The highest-priced dinosaur ever offered by a private seller was Sue, the largest T. rex specimen ever found, which back in 1997 reportedly even attracted a bid from Michael Jackson. After the pandemonium died down, the Field Museum of Chicago was the victor. "What's $8 million and change to someone who invests in art? And that sale was a one-off, it really didn't happen again," Norell sniffs. More recently, Bonhams in New York touted the auction of a theropod and a large horned ceratopsian locked in mortal combat. "Well, let me tell you what the auction houses won't tell you," he continues. "For all that publicity, it was a no-go. The guys who excavated thought they'd go to the Bahamas forever. Instead, they didn't make reserve."
Norell doesn't own any dinosaurs. As part of any museum contract, no curator can collect in his or her study area, or authenticate or appraise fossils for private sale. As for the specimens that surround Norell now at the museum, "I guess there are a few around here that are cool, but I sure as hell wouldn't want them in my house."
I press him: What motivates the collectors? "Honestly? Some people are rabid collectors and some people aren't." He raises a finger. "But there's another segment I've come across, especially in the fossil world, which is kind of like hoarders. All they want is more stuff. I have been in people's houses where every possible inch of their home is covered in fossils; even the dishwasher has trilobites in it."
If you want to really get into the head of the collectors, Norell advises, meet with some private dealers to get their perspective. "I'll forewarn you, though, some are shadier than others, and there is a hidden world of secretive dealers, average Joes without a store who trade at fossil shows, almost a Silk Road of dinosaur dealing."
A lot of the visible trading happens in Tucson, at an annual mineral and fossil show held in February. "People come from all over the world. They always have someone there from Homeland Security, and ICE (the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement)," Norell says.
As Nicolas Cage found out, even big-time buyers can fall foul of anti-smuggling laws. Some of the sellers can knowingly skirt the law. "Crazy stuff goes to Dubai, to Qatar, and pretty regularly to Singapore. And there are all sorts of big odd collections in Germany," Norell tells me. Despite his gripes, he says he genuinely likes some of the private fossil dealers.
Plenty of dino dealing takes place right near my Manhattan home. A year prior to my conversation with Norell, I'd seen a velociraptor claw for sale in a fine-gems store on Fifth Avenue, across the street from Lord & Taylor. Astro Gallery of Gems is the largest gem and mineral store in the world, whose devoted clients have included Salvador Dalí and John Lennon. As I suspected, it is also a dinosaur dealership on the side. "Dinosaurs are not as easy sales as you think," Dennis Tanjeloff, the 48-year-old president and CEO, confides to me. His subterranean office is heavily guarded with expensive digital security; this netherworld below the upstairs public gallery is filled with glinting gemstones and a strange assortment of ancient bones.
Tanjeloff notices me eyeing a pterodactyl-like skeleton a few feet away. "You like my little guy? He's an Odontopteryx toliapica, a prehistoric waterfowl. $125,000."
Tanjeloff describes his ideal dinosaur customer as a grown-up boy who never got over the revelation that prehistoric creatures were real, or that they were on this planet so many million years ago. I agree that we all know that kid who picks his favorite dinosaurs, learns their names and families. "Yes, that's the one. As he got slightly older, he began to process what 200 million years means, and was still enraptured by the thought of a creature that ate three tons of vegetation a day and needed 3,000 teeth to chew dinner."
These days, Tanjeloff mostly buys and sells fossils dug out of private property — and makes no apologies. He also sources fossils directly from paleontologists and geologists, other fossil dealers, and old collections. "Sometimes people have to be reminded that dinosaurs are not in danger of going extinct, you know? They already are. So you are not hurting any creature by selling, trading, or looking for dinosaur fossils; in that way, it is also just like gem collecting." On the flip side, he doesn't peddle to U.S. museums, because "they are federally funded and frankly do not have much money."
Once again, the obsession of the collector and the obsession of the scientist are at odds. I mention that Norell doesn't think much of fossils as investments. Tanjeloff gleams his teeth at me, shaking his head in disagreement: "Scientists don't want to put a value on the dinosaurs; they consider them national treasures for scientific reasons. They don't like a wealthy person taking what they think belongs to everyone to see and enjoy."
Still, Tanjeloff tells me, most of his clients take pride in their collecting choices, and many end up donating their fossils to research. About "80 percent of the time," a buyer won't hold on to his precious bones until the bitter end, despite his initial swagger, so they ultimately end up in a museum or university anyway.
Dinosaur collectors are proving not as easy to classify as I'd hoped. Some people want to possess the best, it seems. Some want to be seen as generous benefactors. And despite what Norell told me, I'm realizing that old-fashioned market speculation is another distinct motivation. "My dinosaurs don't have quarterly reviews, but look at the past 30 years — what you could have bought back then, and what it would cost you now! Even with inflation, the compound is astronomical," Tanjeloff says. "And the numbers today are staggering. There are people spending way more than James Cameron. Some of my best dinosaur clients have very, very large homes."
As I wrap up my visit, my host ponders a jawbone sitting in his inbox and offers another theory. "I strongly believe that this is just the beginning of a craze. I think because the world is so tech-y, and we all live behind screens, that people are really going back to nature. I sell thousands of little fossils a week. We had a section called Astro Kids in the old FAO Schwartz toy store, and when they relaunch next year, we'll be back. Boys who love dinosaurs, they're our future customers."
Excerpted from an article that was originally published by Aeon Media, a digital magazine for ideas and culture. Follow them on Twitter at @aeonmag.
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