Workers at Zoic, a fossil restoration firm in Trieste, Italy, reassemble an Allosaurus unearthed in Wyoming. The specimen later sold at auction in Paris for $1.4 million. PHOTOGRAPH BY GABRIELE GALIMBERTI AND JURI DE LUCA
National Geographic has a story about fossil collectors - professional, commercial, and amateur. There's a good discussion of the pros and cons to commercial fossil collecting. The conclusion is great... I hope it comes to pass!
But the gold rush never quite materialized. There’s a glut of Tyrannosaurus specimens on the market now, and other prize specimens sell only after years of price-cutting. Even so, assorted scandals—faked specimens from China, illicitly smuggled dinosaur bones from Mongolia, and careless or illegal excavations everywhere—have sustained the hostility of some academic paleontologists toward private collectors. So has the tendency to treat precious fossils merely as aesthetic objects, or worse.
In Tucson, one dealer hawked an Apatosaurus leg to passersby, crying, “That would’ve been a heckuva barbecue!” Another dealer was selling a Tyrannosaurus skull—just a resin cast, not the real thing—coated in gold, for the discerning buyer to “show it to friends to say, Wow!” Little wonder one paleontologist argued in a blog post for seizure of some dinosaurs by eminent domain to discourage “those who would profit by stabbing science in the eyes.”
