A court ruling clarified ownership of the “Dueling Dinosaurs.” Part of the specimen is shown here at auction. AP PHOTO/SETH WENIG
Science Magazine has a story about the "Dueling Dinos". Discovered in 2006, the "Dueling Dinos" is a specimen that consists of two dinosaurs, a ceratopsian and a tyrannosaur, lying next to each other in what seems like mortal combat. Over the last few years, a court battle has tried to determine who owns these priceless fossils. On Wednesday, the Montana Supreme Court ruled that fossil could not be considered as minerals and so the land owner not the mineral rights owner would own this fossil. Quite often in the western United States, different entities own land and mineral rights.
A legal saga that threatened to upend fossil hunting in dinosaur-rich Montana has drawn to a close, and paleontologists are breathing a sigh of relief.
The Montana Supreme Court this week ruled that fossils are not legally the same as minerals such as gold or copper. Therefore, Montana fossils, including a dramatic specimen of two dinosaurs buried together, belong to people who own the land where they are found, rather than to the owners of the minerals underneath that land.
The 4-3 decision upholds the way U.S. scientists have long approached questions of fossil ownership. It appears to defuse a potentially explosive 2018 ruling by the federal 9th Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals that fossils went to the owners of mineral rights.
The outcome is a win for scientists who had warned that tying fossils to mineral rights could make it harder to get permission to excavate and could throw into doubt who owns fossils already on display, says David Polly, an Indiana University paleontologist and past president of the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology.
The ruling is the final blow in a war that was, in many ways, already decided. In 2019, the Montana legislature passed a law affirming that fossils belong to landowners.
But it exempted active lawsuits, leaving open the case now decided by the state supreme court. “The general principle was already made by the legislature,” says Polly. “But it is good that the supreme court felt the same.”
