Dinosaur auctions: Is it right to have fossils for sale?

Ever wanted a Tyrannosaurus rex skull on your table or a Deinonychus on your door? Well, it’s all possible thanks to the commercial fossil trade.

As part of this international industry, hundreds of thousands of people around the world work to excavate and collect the preserved remains of many extinct species. These range from relatively common trilobite and ammonite fossils through to rare and complete dinosaur skeletons.

Historically it was unimaginable that the most important fossils collected by the commercial fossil trade would end up anywhere other than a museum. In the past few decades, however, that’s all changed.

With the popularity of dinosaurs reaching new heights, publicly owned museums now find themselves competing with celebrities and hedge funds for the most sought-after specimens. As more fossils enter private ownership, there’s renewed debate about the role of the commercial fossil trade and whether it’s right to have dinosaur fossils for sale at all.

Palaeontologists are caught in the middle and find themselves in a difficult position. While the fossil trade helps to discover scientifically valuable fossils, there are concerns it could lead to valuable details about life on Earth being lost, perhaps forever.

The history of the fossil trade

Palaeontology and the commercial fossil trade have been closely intertwined for centuries. For hundreds of years, scholars and wealthy amateur naturalists would buy and sell a variety of specimens, including fossils, as they assembled vast private collections.

By and large, however, these specimens were acquired on an ad hoc basis, rather than being purchased from commercial dealers. This changed around the turn of the nineteenth century when a rising interest in geology allowed people to work as full-time fossil collectors.

Among these early commercial collectors was Mary Anning, who supported herself and her family by selling fossils from England’s Jurassic Coast. This area is rich in the remains of marine life, including squid-like belemnites and marine reptiles such as Plesiosaurus, and has been recognised as the Jurassic Coast World Heritage Site.

Professor Richard Butler, a palaeontologist from the University of Birmingham, says that collectors such as Mary have made an important contribution to our understanding of the past, especially in the UK.

“The UK’s constantly shifting coastline means that fossils are eroding out of the cliffs all the time,” Richard says. “Without collectors to find and document them, it’s likely that these specimens would be lost to the sea without ever being known about.”

“The work of early collectors like Mary Anning was vital to the development of palaeontology as a science. If they didn’t exist, we’d know very little about the UK’s fossil history.”

As fashions changed and wealthy buyers turned their attention to other pursuits, fossil collectors increasingly sold their finds straight to museums. In turn, these museums also began fossil hunting themselves, commissioning their own teams and professionals such as Charles H Sternberg to find and excavate fossils for study.

The status quo remained much the same for most of the twentieth century but began to change in the 1990s. The release of the film Jurassic Park renewed the public’s appreciation for dinosaurs and provided a new opportunity for the super-rich to demonstrate their wealth.

Dr Cary Woodruff, Curator of Vertebrate Palaeontology at the Phillip and Patricia Frost Museum of Science, says that dinosaur fossils in particular became an “elite status symbol”.

“Not that long ago, rich hunters pursued big cats because it was a symbol of prestige to have a lion as a carpet in your home,” says Cary. “When Jaws came out, fishermen wanted to get the jaws of great white sharks on their wall, and when Jurassic Park came out, people wanted a T. rex in their living room.”

What impacts does the dinosaur fossil trade have on science?

Fast forward to the present day and dinosaurs are bigger than ever. As a result, the commercial fossil trade is experiencing record demand, with the most well-preserved specimens commanding extraordinary prices at auction.

“Today, dinosaur skeletons aren’t sold alongside mineral or geological specimens,” Cary says. “In fact, they’re treated as works of art and are often sold in art venues.”

“This means that fossils like Apex the Stegosaurus can sell for about £34 million at auction, which prices most public museums out of the market. It forces institutions to choose between new specimens and their other commitments, like hiring more staff, constructing new facilities or carrying out new research.”

While fossils acquired by private buyers may eventually go on display in a museum, they often remain largely inaccessible to scientists. This is because concerns over the ethics of studying these fossils mean that most scientists and major journals refuse to consider research on them.

“Science is all about repeatability and being able to check your own work and that of others,” explains Richard. “But access to dinosaurs on loan to a museum could be taken away at any point, meaning it would be impossible to verify any conclusions made using them.”

“Any research on private specimens could also be used to increase the fossil’s apparent value for future sales, which goes against what many palaeontologists believe in.”

As a result of this, what palaeontologists know about dinosaurs is potentially skewed because they’re only able to study publicly owned specimens. This means they only have a subset of the data that could be available to them.

“People sometimes think that just having one of something is special, but in science it’s the exact opposite,” Cary says. “The more individuals of a particular dinosaur species we have, the better we’re able to understand individual variation such as height, body size and shape, as well as how these animals grew.”

“For example, our ballpark understanding is that there are more T. rex specimens in private ownership than there are in all the museums in the world. Just think of what we could learn about the most famous dinosaur in the world if we doubled our sample size.”

As well as taking important specimens out of the reach of scientists, the commercial fossil trade can also affect how useful these dinosaurs are. If information about their geological context isn’t recorded during the excavation, it makes it much harder to know when or where an individual dinosaur lived.

Dinosaur deceit and fossil forgeries

While the vast majority of the fossil trade is carried out legally, some unscrupulous individuals have seen an opportunity to cash in as the price of dinosaurs has grown.

This black market in fossils has particularly affected countries such as Mongolia and Brazil, where the remains of dinosaurs belong to the state. Though it’s illegal for these specimens to be exported without special permission, fossil traffickers have raided sites, ripping dinosaurs out of the ground to sell and damaging important sites in the process.

Sometimes, their escapades aren’t discovered until dinosaurs are offered for sale in other countries. In 2013, for instance, a Tarbosaurus bataar skeleton was returned to Mongolia from the USA after it was determined to have been exported illegally. In 2019 a French court ruled that 45 fossils of dinosaurs, pterosaurs and other animals were removed illegally from Brazil.

While fossil poaching is less of an issue in countries such as the USA and UK, where fossils generally belong to the landowner and can often be sold freely, it’s not unheard of. For example, fossilised dinosaur footprints from Bendrick Rock, Wales, were seized by the police after the tracks were illegally removed from the site.

With pressure from palaeontologists and legal fossil dealers helping to stem the flow of illegal specimens, the black market doesn’t just deal in real dinosaur fossils. The demand for new and unusual species has contributed to the creation of fossil fakes.

One approach is to take real fossils and exaggerate their features using fillers, paints and glues. Irritator challengeri, for example, is a dinosaur named because of “the feeling the authors felt… when discovering that the snout had been artificially elongated”.

Other specimens, meanwhile, contain authentic fossils from multiple animals that have been stuck together. One of the most famous examples is ‘Archaeoraptor’, a composite containing bones from Microraptor, Yanornis and an as-yet-unnamed third animal.

How do fossil sales benefit palaeontology?

While palaeontologists certainly have concerns about the impact of the commercial fossil trade, many acknowledge that it has a role to play in research. Fossil collection techniques, for instance, have been improved by collectors and subsequently adopted in professional palaeontology.

The limited number of palaeontologists worldwide also means that without commercial fossil collecting many important specimens might never have been found. For example, we purchased the first known fossils of the bizarre Moroccan ankylosaur Spicomellus through commercial dealers.

These bones have highlighted the importance of the north African country in the evolution of the ankylosaurs and driven new excavations in the region. Our palaeontologist Professor Susannah Maidment, who has led research into Spicomellus, says that the commercial fossil trade can be a vital source of income.

“Commercial fossil dealing is sometimes portrayed in a very negative way, with some people believing that no one should be allowed to buy fossils,” Susannah explains. “However, I think it’s much more subtle than that.”

“In Morocco, for example, all sorts of different fossils are sold, from trilobites and ammonites to vertebrates such as dinosaurs. It’s worth a great deal of the country’s economy and provides many people who live here with a way to make a living. It’s not our place to try and take that away.”

Cary adds that the specimens made available by the fossil trade also have a role to play in inspiring people to care more about the planet.

“In my personal opinion, there are some fossils that I don’t think it is a problem to own,” says Cary. “When I was a kid, my grandma bought me a trilobite, and I didn’t look at that and think about selling it or how much it was ‘worth’.”

“Instead, I could look at the remains of an animal that was hundreds of millions of years old, which lit a scientific spark for me. Every fossil is a data point, but I think it’s acceptable to privately acquire smaller fossils, especially for educating and inspiring the next generation.”

How could the fossil trade change?

Despite the potential benefits, the involvement of the commercial fossil trade in palaeontology remains controversial. Different scientists take up polarised positions on the issue, with some embracing commercial collectors wholeheartedly and others rejecting a relationship with them altogether.

“I hope there’s a balance to be struck between academic and commercial palaeontology,” Cary says. “One way of doing that is to work more closely with local people, landowners and collectors.”

“By helping people to understand that these dinosaurs aren’t commodities, but datapoints, we can help local people and collectors to look after what they find and ensure that important details about the fossils are preserved.”

At the same time, researchers need to appreciate the economic necessity of the fossil trade for many people. If they want to study a region’s fossils, palaeontologists need to ensure an alternative for its inhabitants.

“It’s really important that when we are working in an area that we’re conscious of the fact that if we’re excavating fossils, we might actually be taking away someone’s income,” says Susannah. “On our Morocco expeditions, for example, we’ve been employing the man who first found the fossils to help us dig.”

“This pays him fairly for the work he’s done in protecting these fossils and ensures that more of the money goes to him rather than a variety of middlemen.”

Where fossils are already in private hands, changes to the law might enable scientists to work on specimens without ethical concerns.

“In Germany, there’s a register of cultural property of national significance,” explains Richard. “These are items, including paintings, manuscripts and fossils, which are deemed so important that their location is recorded and they can’t be sold outside of the country.”

“If scientific access can be ensured, this provides a potential route for privately owned specimens to be studied. A privately owned Archaeopteryx fossil, for example, was able to be described because it’s included on this list.”

While such approaches could help to bring palaeontologists and the commercial fossil trade closer together, the high prices fossils are fetching at auctions continue to be a sticking point in their relationship. If the cost of specimens continues to break records, it may not be long until the goodwill built up between them is going, going, gone.