Dinosaur bone market booming in Wyoming
HULETT, Wyo. — Crouching over a quarry that moonlights as a fossil hunting ground, Peter Larson pointed to a weathered 4inch slab peeking out from a blanket of snow. A commonplace rock to the untrained eye, but an obvious dinosaur bone to Mr. Larson.
“That’s 145 million years old, plus or minus,” said Mr. Larson, 70, a fossil expert and dealer, as he walked through an excavation site that had already yielded seven dinosaurs.
Hulett is fertile ground for the current dinosaur-bone hunting craze. Larson has been digging here for more than 20 years, beginning not long after Sue, a Tyrannosaurus rex fossil that he helped excavate, sold at auction for $8.4 million in 1997. Local landowners then started to wonder if they could farm a new crop: dinosaur skeletons.
Among them were Elaine and Leslie Waugh, who raised sheep on their Wyoming property, not far from the Devils Tower National Monument, but who began to wonder what they should do about all the dinosaur fossils they kept finding.
“We just figured that we should do something with them bones,” said Leslie Waugh, 93. They called Mr. Larson, whose company’s finds required years of painstaking digging.
Fossil hunting has become a multimillion-dollar business, much to the chagrin of academic paleontologists who worry that specimens of scientific interest are being sold off to the highest bidders.
Sue’s record price was beaten by Stan, another T. rex that Mr. Larson’s company excavated; it sold at auction in 2020 for $31.8 million. This year a Deinonychus (the inspiration for the Velociraptors depicted in the film “Jurassic Park”) sold for $12.4 million. Next month, a T. rex skull is estimated to fetch between $15 million and $20 million. Buyers include financiers, Hollywood stars, tech industry leaders and a crop of new or developing natural history museum facilities in China and the Middle East.
This month Christie’s had hoped for another blockbuster dinosaur auction, expecting a T. rex skeleton named Shen to fetch between $15 million and $25 million. But the sale in Hong Kong was called off after Mr. Larson and others raised questionsabout the specimen.
Mr. Larson was examining a photograph of Shen when he realized that it seemed familiar: Its skull looked a lot like Stan’s.
His company, the Black Hills Institute of Geological Research, retains intellectual property rights to Stan, selling polyurethane casts of the specimen for $120,000 each. After a lawyer for the Black Hills Institute raised the issue, Christie’s clarified its online marketing materials to note that Shen had been supplemented with replicas of Stan’s bones. On Nov. 20, Christie’s withdrew Shen from the sale altogether.
Things were simpler at the beginning of his career, Mr. Larson said, when universities, museums and a smaller group of private collectors were the only ones who cared. It was not until 1997, with the sale of Sue, that dinosaurs started to be viewed as potential centerpieces of auctions.
In 2000, Sue was unveiled at the Field Museum in Chicago, and its 600-pound skull became the face of the growing public fascination with dinosaurs.
Scientists feel priced out
Many scientists are aghast at the growing commercial market, and increasingly anxious that scientifically important specimens will disappear into private mansions. Paleontologists are also concerned that the market could encourage illegal digging, and that U.S. landowners — who, by law, generally own the fossils found on their land — would favor commercial fossil hunters over-academic researchers.
“Ranchers who used to let you go and collect specimens are now wondering why they should let you have it for free,” said Jingmai O’Connor, a Field Museum paleontologist, “when a commercial collector would dig up the bones and split the profit.”
Fossil diggers and dealers in the commercial sphere counter that if not for them, these specimens on private land would be left to erode further, never to be found.
The United States is an outlier legally. Other dinosaur-rich nations, including Mongolia and Canada, have laws making fossils the property of the government.
Mr. Larson sees it as a good thing that the broader public is assigning this kind of value to fossils.
“You should be happy that fossils are being appreciated like works of art,” Larson said. (Minutes before Stan had hit the auction block, a Mark Rothko painting sold for $31.3 million, a half-million less than the fossil.)