Private buyers are paying record sums for dinosaur fossils. Is science getting left by the wayside?

How big is the private market? 
There's no accurate figure, but interest from wealthy collectors has sent prices spiking in recent years. A Tyrannosaurus rex skeleton known as Stan sold for an unprecedented $31.8 million at a Christie's auction in 2020; the buyer was later revealed to be Abu Dhabi's Department of Culture and Tourism. In 2022, a mystery buyer snapped up the skeleton of a Deinonychus antirrhopus — the inspiration for the velociraptors in Jurassic Park—for $12.4 million at another Christie's sale. Last week, hedge fund billionaire Ken Griffin splashed $44.6 million at a Sotheby's auction on the largest and most complete stegosaurus fossil ever found; it had been expected to sell for up to $6 million. Eleven feet tall and 27 feet long, Apex, as the 150 million-year-old specimen is known, was excavated near the town of Dinosaur, Colo., by a so-called commercial paleontologist. Griffin is considering loaning the specimen to a U.S. institution, saying, "Apex was born in America and is going to stay in America!" Yet despite that pledge, many academic paleontologists are opposed to such sales. "Most of the time these fossils literally disappear into the collection of some nameless über-rich person," said Steve Brusatte, a paleontologist at the University of Edinburgh. 

When did dinosaur collecting begin? 
The earliest collection may have belonged to the Roman emperor Augustus, whose collection of wonders included "the huge bones of beasts of land and sea, known as the 'bones of giants,'" according to the historian Suetonius. Modern interest in these fossils took off in the early decades of the 1800s, when researchers came to understand them as the remains of ancient creatures — named Dinosauria (terrible lizard) by British anatomist Sir Richard Owen. The first complete dinosaur skeleton, of an armored Scelidosaurus, was uncovered in the 1850s along the so-called Jurassic Coast in southwest England. In the U.S., dinosaur mania exploded following the discovery of a duck-billed hadrosaur in a New Jersey quarry in 1858. A decade later, that 14-foot-long fossil became the world's first mounted dinosaur skeleton, doubling the number of visitors to the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia. The opening up of the American West's rich fossil grounds led to new discoveries and turned dinosaurs into status symbols for Gilded Age tycoons such as Andrew Carnegie. 

How did Carnegie get involved? 
In 1898, the steel baron read in a newspaper about the discovery of the remains of the "most colossal animal ever on Earth" in Wyoming. Carnegie, soon to become the world's richest man, decided he had to own them. But when the fossils turned out to be less impressive than advertised, he dispatched his own team of bone hunters to find prehistory's greatest beast. They did so the following July, unearthing a 75-foot-long, 14-ton behemoth. It would be named in his honor — Diplodocus carnegii — and installed at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh. Determined to outdo Carnegie, Henry Fairfield Osborn, a paleontologist at New York's American Museum of Natural History and the son of a shipping magnate, dispatched fossil hunter Barnum Brown to find something even more impressive. Brown discovered the world's first Tyrannosaurus rex fossils in Montana in 1902, turning himself, Osborn, and the T. rex into international celebrities. In the following years, museums distanced themselves from the commercial specimen trade, thinking it unscientific. But the release of the 1993 blockbuster Jurassic Park revived interest in the trade, and in 1997, a T. rex skeleton known as Sue was sold by Sotheby's for a then-record $8.4 million. 

What's wrong with such sales? 
Unlike art museums, natural history museums don't typically budget for acquisitions. Even if they did, they would likely be outbid by tech billionaires and bankers. China, Mongolia, Brazil, Argentina, and Canada, where some of the richest bone beds are found, treat dinosaur fossils as cultural heritage and don't allow them to be exported, though some are smuggled out anyway. U.S. law treats them more like mineral rights, and there are many commercial prospectors in states such as Montana, Wyoming, and the Dakotas. 
 
Does that matter? 
Paleontologists are interested in the rock layers in which fossils are found as well as in the fossils themselves: "site stratigraphy" lets them deduce a lot about dinosaurs' environment. Commercial diggers, not to mention illegal excavators, are less likely to document this. They're also prone to cleaning up bones with high-pressure blasts of baking powder, and filling in cracks with epoxy resin. The amount of money involved leads to scientists being effectively priced out of some rich territory — and to legal battles over ownership rights. In 2022, a T. rex known as Shen was withdrawn from sale in Hong Kong when it was discovered that the skeleton had been "supplemented" with copies of Stan's bones, which are the intellectual property of the company that excavated Stan. 

Can scientists protect specimens? 
The major scientific journals won't publish studies of privately held fossils, and the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology argues that the ban should be extended to private specimens on long-term loan to museums. Not everyone agrees. Most historical specimens — including every known archaeopteryx — were found by amateur enthusiasts: Why exclude them? Many buyers lend their trophies to museums, where they're accessible to scientists, and, arguably, even the most money-minded fossil hunters play a role in conservation. "Every year, thousands of fossils around the world are exposed to the elements by ordinary geological processes," said Cassandra Hatton, head of natural history at Sotheby's, "before being weathered to dust without a trace." 

The 'Bone Wars' 
In the 1860s, the transcontinental railroad opened up the American West — and, with it, the rich bone beds of Wyoming, Colorado, and Nebraska. The result was the Great Dinosaur Rush — and a heated rivalry between two leading paleontologists, Edward Drinker Cope and Othniel Charles Marsh. Initially, their relationship was amicable, but it degenerated into a personal feud as they tried to outdo each other in discoveries and discredit each other's theories. Marsh insulted Cope by pointing out that he'd put a plesiosaur's head at the wrong end of its skeleton. The tensions led to stone-throwing battles between rival teams of excavators, damage to sites, and — for both men — financial ruin. Yet they did both discover many new species. Strictly speaking, Marsh won the "Bone Wars," with 80 new types of dinosaurs to his name, against Cope's 56. Cope left his own skull to science in the hope of proving that his brain was bigger than Marsh's. Marsh, however, declined the challenge.

Around the country and across party lines, Americans are "on edge," said Emily Cochrane in The New York Times. This unease is not simply a result of the assassination attempt against Donald Trump. "Roiled by culture wars, reeling since the pandemic, broiling under biblical heat, and besieged by disinformation," voters say they worry what horror could come next. "It's like this dark cloud is looming over us, and it's just not ending," said Fredes Asuncion, 34, a small-business owner in Sacramento. Adding to it all is the unrelenting partisan hostility, "and the sense, for a third straight presidential election, that something essential is broken in our politics." Some 80 percent of Americans think the country is spiraling out of control, according to a poll taken after the attack on Trump, while 47 percent said in May that another U.S. civil war was likely or very likely in their lifetimes. "Our nation is not well," said Brent Leatherwood, leader of the Southern Baptist Convention's public-policy arm.

"The vibes feel even darker" than after the U.S. Capitol insurrection of Jan. 6, 2021, said Vera Bergengruen in Time. A growing share of Americans now view their ideological opponents as existential threats to the nation. In an April poll, 28 percent of Republicans and 12 percent of Democrats said Americans may "have to resort to violence to get the country back on track." Some are acting on those beliefs by making threats against elected and civic officials, from small-town election clerks to prominent legislators. Last year, more than 8,000 threats were reported against members of Congress, a tenfold increase since 2015. Amid this "political violence crisis," the attempt on Trump's life feels "surreal yet predictable."

We've been here before, said Grace Segers in The New Republic. The turmoil of 1968 was defined by bitter national divisions over the Vietnam War and the civil rights movement, and by the assassinations of two leading political figures: Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy. It was also a time of "rising mistrust in the government, which is echoed today in the deep unpopularity" of Congress and the Supreme Court. "Periods of political violence do end," said Adrienne LaFrance in The Atlantic, "but often not without shocking retrenchments of people's freedoms or catastrophic events coming first." To avoid a true cataclysm, we must elect leaders at all levels "who reject political violence unconditionally, in word and in deed." Our national sickness won't be cured "until Americans come together to say 'Enough.'" 

Nicolas Cage has an uneasy relationship with social media, said Susan Orlean in The New Yorker. Many of the actor's most over-the-top movie moments — a bug-eyed Cage exclaiming "You don't say!" in Vampire's Kiss or screaming "Not the bees!" in The Wicker Man — have gained a second life online after being turned into memes. A YouTube compilation called "Nicolas Cage Losing His S---" has clocked several million views. Cage, 60, was unprepared for his online mythos. "When I signed up to be a film actor, we didn't have the internet," he says. "We didn't have cell phones with cameras. I didn't know this was going to happen to me in such a pervasive way — the so-called memes." 

He believes those viral clips and compilations present a skewed snapshot of his performances. "It is funny. But there's a reason why that character is acting like that. It's not only for laughs, you know?" Going viral has taught him to resist overexposure. "I think all actors now have to be very careful who they talk to and where it's going. This Instagram thing? No. That's the quickest way to bore people. Now that you've got this giant machine out there called the internet, less is definitely more. Don't do documentaries about yourself. Don't do other people's documentaries. Stay away. Go away!"