Dino wars

In 2015, Reuters reported that actor Nicolas Cage voluntarily handed over a dinosaur skull to US authorities after it emerged that it had entered the US illegally from Mongolia, where the export of dinosaur fossils has been a crime since 1924. Cage had paid $276 000 for the 70-million-year-old Tyrannosaurus bataar skull, outbidding Leonardo DiCaprio at a 2007 auction held by the IM Chait gallery in Beverly Hills. DiCaprio must have been relieved he lost that bid, but he doesn’t seem all that attached to the other old bones in his collection.

In 2008 he sold a Mosasaur skull to Russell Crowe for a reported $35 000. Crowe later told a radio host that he was drunk when he signed the cheque, and this year he put the mounted fossil up for auction in his muchpublicised sale, The Art of Divorce.

Sotheby’s described the lot thus: “The fossil relative of the monitor lizard family, which includes the Komodo dragon, the Mosasaur was a giant, serpentine marine reptile which was prevalent during the Late Cretaceous Period, approximately 65 million years ago. Mosasaurs were formidable hunters, with a double-hinged jaw and a flexible skull enabling them to eat their prey whole.” It was sold to an unnamed buyer for $79 300 (about R957 000). Perhaps DiCaprio bought it back.