Auction Makes No Bones About Selling Fossils

The Age of the Dinosaurs goes on the block Thursday when bidding begins at one of the first large auctions of prehistoric fossils.

Featuring a Tyrannosaurus skull, various so-called raptor dinosaurs and a woolly mammoth skeleton, the Dinosaurs & Other Prehistoric Creatures event staged by Guernsey’s auction house at New York’s Park Avenue Armory includes more than 300 fossils. Most are from more than 68 million years ago, when dinosaurs ruled the Earth.

Organizers say such sales increase public interest in dinosaurs and boost support for the scholarship done by paleontologists. But many paleontologists, who study these fossils to learn how dinosaurs lived, loathe auctions of the remains of ancient creatures. They fear that their study materials will become high-priced commodities.

Natural-history sales often feature dinosaur fossils, but a large auction devoted almost solely to these fossils is unique, dealers say. ”There’s never been a sale focusing entirely on ancient animals,” says Arlan Ettinger of Guernsey’s. ”But dinosaurs are as popular a field as one can imagine.”

In 1997, a Tyrannosaurus rex fossil skeleton nicknamed Sue sold for $8.36 million to Chicago’s Field Museum. Last month, however, parts of a T. rex nicknamed Barnum went for $93,250, much less than expected.

Fossil ages in the Guernsey’s auction range from ammonites — spiral-shelled sea creatures — dating to 360 million years ago, long before the first dinosaurs, to a saber-toothed cat skull from only 6 million years back, well within our current Age of Mammals. Other interesting items from fossil dealers include:

* Canadian ammonites, 71 million years old, whose shells have turned to gemstone through a geological fluke. Included is one bearing bite marks from a dinosaur.

* An Anatotitan duck-billed dinosaur skull, skeleton and skin fossil.

* A historically interesting hump-backed whale skeleton from the 1840s once owned by P.T. Barnum.

Estimates on selling prices, never a sure thing at auctions, range from $500 for fossil trilobites, forerunners of today’s horseshoe crabs, to $90,000 for a mammoth skull.

In the United States, the sale of dinosaur fossils found on private land is legal, unlike in many other countries. The Association of Applied Paleontological Sciences, a trade group for fossil dealers founded in 1978, lists 157 business members worldwide, the bulk of them U.S.-based. The relationship between dealers, fossil hunters and paleontologists has long been contentious.

Bylaws for the Society of Vertebrate Paleontologists state: ”The barter, sale or purchase of scientifically significant vertebrate fossils is not condoned, unless it brings them into or keeps them within a public trust.”

Whether the items appearing at auctions such as Guernsey’s are scientifically significant is often difficult to determine.

”The public is being taken for a ride in a lot of the claims made to sell these fossils and in how they are reconstructed,” says paleontologist Kevin Padian of the University of California-Berkeley. In general, scholarly paleontologists most often complain that the trade in fossils:

* Encourages theft from academic digs, which is a recurring problem for researchers.

* Leads to bids by dealers to open national parks to backhoes so collectors can quickly rip fossils out of the ground for quick sale.

* Encourages black-market trade in fossils from countries such as China and Argentina.

* Results in the loss of priceless scientific knowledge when private collectors remove fossils from the original setting without adequate scientific observation. Disciplines such as paleobiology, which looks at the context of fossil settings, and taphonomy, which looks at the process that creates fossils, exist to examine these locations.

”We’re not insensitive to such concerns,” Ettinger says. ”But we’re not encouraging people to buy shovels and rip up the ground.”

Instead, he suggests that fossil auctions build public interest in the ancient world. ”Millions of people become aware of these things when we sell them to museums,” he says.

Padian and others in the field counter that scientists and educators should be the ones who inform the public about paleontology, not fossil dealers. But, he says, ”We do try to work with collectors to encourage them to adopt better practices for posterity and the scientific process.”