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| DATE | 2020-10-14 |
| FROM | Ruben Safir
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| SUBJECT | Subject: [Hangout - NYLXS] Fossils and Private Property
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nationalgeographic.com
'Stan' the T. rex just sold for $31.8 million—and scientists are furious
By Michael Greshko
12-15 minutes
More than three decades ago in South Dakota, an amateur paleontologist
named Stan Sacrison discovered a titan of the ancient Earth: the fossil
of a mostly complete, 39-foot-long Tyrannosaurus rex. Nicknamed “Stan”
after its discoverer, the beast was excavated in 1992 and has long been
housed at the private Black Hills Institute of Geological Research in
Hill City, South Dakota. But even if you’ve never been there, chances
are good that you’ve seen this particular T. rex. Dozens of high-quality
casts of its bones are on display in museums around the world, from
Tokyo to Albuquerque, New Mexico.
Now, an auctioneer’s hammer has thrown Stan’s future into question, with
the dinosaur bones sold off to the highest—and, so far,
anonymous—bidder, stoking fear among experts that this beloved T. rex
may be lost to science.
On October 6, the London-based auction house Christie’s sold the T. rex
for a record $31.8 million, the highest price ever paid at auction for a
fossil. The previous record was set in 1997 with the sale of “Sue,” a
largely complete T. rex dug up by the same South Dakota institute and
eventually purchased by the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago
for $8.36 million (equivalent to nearly $13.5 million today).
The day after Stan was sold, paleontologist Lindsay Zanno of the North
Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences described the sale price as “simply
staggering.”
“That’s an astronomical price that borders on absurdity, based on my
knowledge of the market,” added paleontologist David Evans, the
vertebrate paleontology chair at the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto,
who suggested the anonymous buyer could have spent the same funds in a
far more effective way to deepen humanity’s understanding of the
prehistoric beasts. “If this kind of money [were] invested properly, it
could easily fund 15 permanent dinosaur research positions, or about 80
full field expeditions per year, in perpetuity,” he wrote in an email
interview.
Scientists also have raised concerns about the negative ripple effects
the sale could have on the study of dinosaurs by incentivizing people to
seek out and sell well-preserved fossils rather than leaving them for
paleontologists to study. (Find out more about the U.S. fossil trade in
National Geographic magazine.)
“This is terrible for science and is a great boost and incentive for
commercial outfits to exploit the dinosaur fossils of the American
West,” says tyrannosaur expert Thomas Carr, a paleontologist at Carthage
College in Kenosha, Wisconsin.
Paleontologists fear that if the buyer turns out to be a private
collector, researchers and the public could lose access to the fossil,
limiting their ability to repeat results such as measurements of its
bones or conduct new analyses with more advanced tools and techniques.
(Find out how scientists are reimaging dinosaurs in today’s “golden age”
of paleontology.)
The ability to repeat experiments is “a tenet of science; it's part of
our ethical foundation,” Zanno says. “The paleontological world is
holding its breath” to find out Stan’s future.
Why sell Stan?
The Black Hills Institute is perhaps best known for its involvement in
the collection of—and years-long custody battle over—the T. rex named
Sue, which involved an FBI raid and a legal dispute with the Cheyenne
River Sioux. While not quite as dramatic, Stan’s sale also stems from a
court ruling. (Find out more about Sue, the world’s most famous T. rex,
in National Geographic magazine.)
For years, the Black Hills Institute had Stan on display in its Hill
City museum. In addition to selling resin casts to other museums, the
institute gave researchers access to the fossil, resulting in a flurry
of scientific papers about everything from T. rex’s immense bite force
to how the skull of T. rex could flex and move.
“The skeleton of Stan is without doubt one of the very best
Tyrannosaurus rex specimens ever found, and it’s been published in the
scientific literature many times,” Evans says. “Stan is one of the
keystone specimens for understanding T. rex.”
Carr, for one, included Stan in three studies of tyrannosaur diversity
and skull shape earlier in his career. He now regrets that decision
because the fossil was always in private hands and therefore at risk of
being sold. “In the end, I wound up contributing to the successful sales
pitch of the fossil … along with the other 45 scientific publications on
Stan,” he says. “We shouldn't have touched it with a 10-foot pole.”
Stan’s path to the auction block began in 2015, when Neal Larson, a
35-percent shareholder in the Black Hills Institute (and brother of the
institute’s president, paleontologist Pete Larson), sued the company to
liquidate its assets. According to South Dakota’s Rapid City Journal,
the company had removed Neal Larson from its board of directors three
years earlier, after a bitter dispute over business dealings and his
defense of a former employee accused of sexual misconduct.
A judge ruled in 2018 that Stan had to be auctioned off to pay Neal
Larson for his stake in the institute, according to a company press
release. Despite Stan’s sale, the Black Hills Institute retains the
rights to make and sell future casts of the T. rex’s bones, including
full-size replica skeletons.
“We were saddened to learn that the winner of the auction was probably
not a museum, but we are hopeful that the new owner will eventually put
Stan on display so the public will be able to continue to see and study
this awesome original skeleton,” Pete Larson said in an October 7 press
release.
Dinosaurs 101 Over a thousand dinosaur species once roamed the Earth.
Learn which ones were the largest and the smallest, what dinosaurs ate
and how they behaved, as well as surprising facts about their extinction.
In 2018, James Hyslop, the head of the science and natural history
department at Christie’s, began to shepherd Stan through the auction
process. On October 6, Hyslop was on the phone with the anonymous
bidder, calling out their winning purchase price from Christie’s London
office.
In an email to National Geographic, Hyslop declined to comment on the
winning bidder’s identity, or even whether the buyer was a private
collector or a public research institution. “As is the case with all
successful sales, we are pleased to have achieved a strong result,” he
wrote. “It has been an honor to have had the opportunity to work with
such an extraordinary specimen.”
Luxury and loss
In the U.S., fossil bones found on federal land are public property and
can be collected only by researchers with permits. These remains also
must stay in the public trust, in approved repositories such as
accredited museums.
However, fossils discovered on U.S. private land can be bought and sold,
and Stan isn’t the only U.S. dinosaur fossil recently on the auction
block. In 2018, the French auctioneer Arguttes sold off a skeleton of
the predatory dinosaur Allosaurus, drawing criticism from scientists
because its sale, like Stan’s, risked creating the perception that
dinosaurs were worth more in dollars than they were in discoveries.
The 2,000-member Society of Vertebrate Paleontology (SVP), which
represents paleontologists around the world, opposes fossil auctions and
has long discouraged the study of privately held fossils, out of concern
that researchers and the public wouldn’t always be guaranteed access to
them. In September, the organization sent a letter to Christie’s asking
them to restrict bidders for Stan to public research institutions. In
its reply, Christie’s acknowledged the society’s stance but said that
the sale couldn’t be restricted, according to University of Bristol
paleontologist and outgoing SVP president Emily Rayfield, who co-signed
the society’s letter.
“The high-profile nature of the auction and the publicity surrounding
the auction event were designed to appeal to high-end bidders, thereby
elevating the price of fossil material and promoting fossils as luxury
items,” Rayfield wrote in an email interview. “How can public trust
institutions spend this kind of money on single fossil specimens—money
that could fund jobs, field programs, training, exhibits, and much more?”
Other countries take stricter stances on the fossil trade. In Alberta,
Canada, for instance, fossils found in the province can’t be exported,
thanks to a 1970s law that designated fossils part of Alberta’s natural
heritage. Similar laws are also on the books in paleo-hotspots such as
Brazil, China, and Mongolia. However, Evans says that black markets
persist in fossils from these countries, in part because of the allure
of huge paydays. (Find out more about the Mongolian fossil black
market—and one scientist’s fight against it.)
“The sale of Stan will perpetuate more pillaging of protected fossils in
a big way,” Evans says. “It’s heartbreaking.”
University of Calgary paleontologist Jessica Theodor, SVP’s incoming
president, adds that auctions don’t just price out researchers—they can
shape the hunt for fossils for years to come. After Sue’s
multimillion-dollar sale in 1997, some U.S. researchers were shut out of
private land sites they had worked on for decades, Theodor says, in part
because landowners wanted to sell their fossils or lease their land’s
fossil-digging rights to private companies. Paleontologists also saw a
rise in vandalism at fossil sites as robbers tried to steal what they
thought were valuable remains.
“A big sale like this stands to do much more damage than [the sale of]
Sue did,” Theodor said.
A paleontological plea
Commercial fossil diggers in the U.S. have long argued that their
business model brings important fossils to light, because the profit
motive encourages more people to dig. The most reputable of these firms
excavate and prepare fossils to high standards, and they contact
researchers when they’ve found fossils of clear scientific significance.
At its best, this system can find and protect invaluable fossils, such
as the armored dinosaur Zuul crurivastator, which U.S. fossil firm
Theropoda found on private Montana ranchland in 2014. Once Theropoda
realized what it had, it contacted Canada’s Royal Ontario Museum, which
sent researchers to the site and bought the fossil for an undisclosed
sum in 2016. (Learn more about Zuul and its remarkable armor in National
Geographic magazine.)
For all the debate around commercial sales, public auctions are beasts
unto themselves. Bidding wars can drive up a fossil’s price to far
beyond what any university or museum could afford. As a result, fossils
that would otherwise enter the public trust go into private collections
instead.
Stan appears to be the spoils of such a war. During Tuesday’s auction,
two bidders drove Stan’s price up by millions of dollars in a matter of
minutes. The meteoric rise almost certainly priced out most public
institutions—especially this year, as COVID-19 has financially
devastated museums the world over.
The paleontologists contacted by National Geographic urged Stan’s new,
anonymous owner to donate the T. rex specimen to a museum or research
institution.
“Do the right thing: totally relinquish your ownership of the fossil and
donate it to an accredited natural history museum so that science can
ethically be done on Stan for the benefit of everyone on the planet who
has an interest in dinosaurs,” Carr urged.
“You have the opportunity to share a treasure with the world,” Zanno
added. “It's a rare gift—take it.”
--
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