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| Like smoke, does the price tag hang around after real museums purchase dinosaurs? With apologies to the late Amy Winehouse. |
Naturalis T. rex
Although the SVP ethics does condone the purchase of fossils
into the public trust, it is still most dispiriting for me to know colleagues
who are engaged in that activity. Nothing dampens my morale more that to hear
them blithely discuss the “going market rate” for, say, a T. rex or a Triceratops. How should museums treat that "market", I wonder?
The same people tell me that I
represent the “hard line” on the sale of dinosaur fossils. Although we both
lament the sale of fossils to private individuals, we in academe find ourselves
on opposite sides of the principle of protecting fossils for Science and
education.
My fossil purchasing colleagues rationalize their actions
by saying that it is better than a given dinosaur fossil landing in private
hands; in the end, they say, the fossil is where it belongs despite how it got
there. That's just the way it is. The alternative is the oblivion of private ownership where data is
lost to science indefinitely, so purchases made by legitimate museums is the lesser of two evils.
Not so fast.
It is with ambivalence I receive the news about the recent
purchase of an adult T. rex by
the
Naturalis Museum (Netherlands) for $5 million euros: I’m glad the
specimen is headed for a real museum, but the price tag sticks like a
thorn through the eye. Should
I be concerned? The concern my fossil-buying colleagues have is that T. rex fossils are “overpriced” and
drive up the “market value” of dinosaur fossils in general. Good grief.
The information on the exchange for the specimen is pretty
slim, and one source (CIHAN, 2014), provides the backbone of the story:
a) The specimen was found on private land in Montana in May
2013.
b) The specimen includes skull and skeleton of an adult,
which is approximately 12 meters long. It is missing the feet, left leg, and
arms; it was found in sandstone and the bones are not distorted.
c) Preparation of the specimen, and mounting on a metal
armature for display is being done by the Black Hills Institute of Geological Research (BHIGR) Inc.
d) The Naturalis Museum collected the specimen, almost
certainly with assistance from BHIGR Inc.
e) “As its excavator Naturalis had the first right for purchase” (emphasis added).
d) The Naturalis had to pay $5 million euros, or $6.1
million USD for the specimen, presumably to the landowner.
e) A crowd funding campaign brought in $230,000.00 euros,
and the rest “came from companies, individuals, funds, the municipality of
Leiden and Naturalis”. A large part of the funds were raised through
kickstarter.
f) The specimen will go on display in mid 2016.
g) The Naturalis Museum says it will publish a bunch of
research on the specimen.
Should I be concerned? Regardless of the
negotiations between landowner and museum, Naturalis has sent the
message to everyone with a dinosaur skeleton on their land that museums
will pay just about anything
for the fossil and will go to extraordinary lengths to raise the money to buy it.
With behavior
like that I’m not convinced that legitimate natural history museums
aren’t less of a problem as the private hoarders; together they keep the “market”
alive
and kicking because they’ll pay top dollar. For some perspective, a
million dollars could easily fund a decade of a large museum's field
program.
My fossil-buying friends would say that it isn’t
their
fault – the precedent was set by the auction of Sue to the Field Museum
for
about $8 million USD. Ergo, we’re stuck. From my point of view, it is
our
responsibility as scientists to treat the price tag of Sue as an
anomalously
high outlier that no one (in academe at least) has since taken
seriously, and no Science respecting museum will ever pay that much
again.
Wouldn’t Science be better
served if the scientist holding the check book just said “no” to an marked up price tag?! Instead, a museum could, say, offer landowners a percentage of the admission
tickets and the merchandizing that stems from the fossil. Certainly there must be
alternatives to just paying out astronomical amounts of money that gives the extortion-level
“going rate” for dinosaurs, and the “market” itself, no end in sight.
So what happens when a museum doesn’t cave in and a sale flops? Then
the fossils are gone and Science keeps
the high road, which of course has a steep cost in terms of the
indefinite loss of the specimen. Over time, people with fossils
for sale will find that dinosaurs aren't the winning lottery tickets
they had thought them to be (assuming that private hoarders wise up to
this as well). There is the remote hope that at some point in the future
the dinosaur will change hands, or the private hoarder will change
heart, and the fossil will be positioned for donation to a museum.
The
alternative is for museums to follow the Naturalis example and pay the exorbitant cost and give a clear message to all that the
value of the "market" stands head and shoulders above the value of
Science.
T. rex
list of shame, expanded and updated.
I have added six additional T. rex specimens (in red text) to the T. rex List of Shame that are documented
in Larson (2008); that list was up to date as of August 2006. For the present
time, I have not included specimens that are housed in what are essentially
nonaccredited private collections and privately owned, but nonprofit museums.
In their relatively high public profile such places occupy a gray area (perhaps
dark gray) between outright private collections on the one hand, and legitimate
(i.e., accredited) and long established museums on the other.
Regardless, the 14 specimens in this
list represent a substantial and devastating loss to science in that it includes a growth series, from
juvenile to adult. Were these specimens in real museums, the sample size of
each primary growth stage (juvenile, subadult, young adult, senescent adult)
would be increased significantly and we’d have a better sense of the range of
variation in each stage.Unfortunately, I expect this list to increase in number as the years progress unless the culture tips away from commerce and toward Science and education.
1. Barnum:
partial skull and postcranial skeleton; found in 1996; collected from Wyoming;
sold at auction for over $90,000.00 USD to investors from South Dakota in May
2004.
2. Ollie:
incomplete skull and skeleton; found in 1998; collected from Montana; owned by
Great Plains Paleontology (Madison, WI).
3. Rex-C: partial
skull and skeleton; found in 1999; collected from South Dakota.
4. Monty: partial
skull and skeleton; found in 2000; collected from Wyoming; owned by Babiarz
Institute of Paleontological Studies, Mesa (AZ).
5. Otto: partial
postcranial skeleton; found in 2001; collected from Montana; owned by Great
Plains Paleontology (Madison, WI).
6. Wayne: partial
postcranial skeleton; found in 2004; collected from North Dakota; privately owned.
7. Cupcake:
subadult skull and jaws; almost certainly collected from Montana; owned by The
Amazing Traveling Dinosaur Show, British Columbia; on display in Victoria, BC
in December, 2014.
8. King
Kong: adult skull and skeleton; collected from Montana; privately owned by
an individual person; a project of The Amazing Traveling Dinosaur Show; was on
public display at the Mineralientage Munchen, at Munich Trade Fair Center Oct
24-25 2014.
9. Tinker:
subadult skull and skeleton; collected in South Dakota in 1998; privately
owned; presently on display in an art gallery in Dubai; for sale for $10
million; found associated with the adult specimen Regina.
10. Regina:
adult; found associated with Tinker; the pair is for sale between $12 and $14
million.
11 & 12. Russell: composite skeleton of two adults; offered for sale at the
Bonham’s auction in November, 2013; on display at a 2013 Gem and Mineral show
(Denver or Tucson).
13. Dueling
tyrannosaur: subadult skull and skeleton; offered for sale at the Bonham’s
auction in November, 2013; associated with a ceratopsian; owned by CK
Productions.
References cited
CIHAN. Dec. 30, 2014. Feature: Night watch, tulips and T.
rex in the Netherlands.
Larson, N. 2008. One hundred years of Tyrannosaurus
rex: the skeletons; pp. 1-55
in
P. Larson, and K. Carpenter (eds.) Tyrannosaurus
rex, the Tyrant King. Indiana University Press, Bloomington.
