A wealthy collector spent $6.1 million Thursday to buy the only known skeleton of a Gorgosaurus that’s available for private ownership, resurrecting a feud in the paleontology community over the sale of fossils to private buyers.
In 1998, John Hoganson, paleontologist emeritus of the North Dakota Geological Survey, foreshadowed a tension that would only grow over the next 24 years between scientists like himself, who want to keep fossils in the public domain for scientific study, and those involved in “a thriving international market for fossils and the resulting collecting and selling of fossils by profiteers,”More than a decade later, the business of private prospecting was booming, according to a 2009 Smithsonian...
“In terms of digging for fossils, there are a lot more people” than there used to be, Matthew Carrano, curator of dinosauria at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History,Magazine. “Twenty years ago, if you ran into a private or commercial fossil prospector in the field, it was one person or a couple of people. Now, you go to good fossil locations in, say, Wyoming, and you find quarrying operations with maybe 20 people working, and doing a professional job of excavating fossils.
Five years later, researchers warned that the tension had grown and would continue to do so, posing “the greatest challenge to paleontology of the 21st century.” In a 2014 paper, the researchers said that new discoveries had led to a new “Golden Age” in the field that paleontologists could use to inspire people about their work and science generally. But the researchers warned that those scientists needed to do a better job of conveying the value of fossils to the general public.
But, Erickson added, it goes deeper than that. Dinosaurs — T. rex, Stegosaurus, Brontosaurus, Pterodactyl — are some of the first creatures that inspire awe and excitement in children. The frenzy around their fossils, and even a chance to own one, is a way to tap into that wonder again., “so I can see why people buy dinosaur fossils.”
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