The $8.3 auction sale of Sue the Tyrannosaurus rex fossil to the Field Museum of Natural History may have created a monster that will scare even the most intrepid dinosaur hunters in the future.
That is what some of the biggest names in the dinosaur business were saying Wednesday as 900 scientists gathered at the Ramada Congress Hotel for the four-day meeting of the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology.
“I try to find the upside of it (the Sue auction), but I can’t find it yet,” said John Horner, the model of the paleontologist hero of the “Jurassic Park” book and movie.
Horner, director of the Museum of the Rockies dinosaur museum in Bozeman, Mont., said because of Sue, the price of looking for fossils, particularly on private land, may become prohibitive for scientists.
Most scientists at the opening of the 57th annual meeting of the paleontological society applauded the Field’s acquisition of Sue, which was unearthed by a commercial collector on private land. It assured that the dinosaur, the biggest, most complete and perfectly preserved T. rex fossil ever found, will remain in this country under the care and study of a world-class curatorial and scientific staff.
But some long-standing tensions also are coming to the fore within the society, which is open to academic, amateur and commercial paleontologists and collectors.
Academics like Horner would like to severely curtail commercial collectors from profiting in selling dinosaur bones.
“There’s billions of fossils in the ground for every one collected,” responded Allen Graffham, president of Geological Enterprises, a commercial fossil dealer in Ardmore, Okla. “There’s plenty to go around for everyone. There aren’t enough academics to collect what there is out there, and fossils weather away pretty damn fast. So where’s the loss if commercial collectors go in?”
Dinosaurs, once mostly the province of natural history museums and dusty workrooms of university researchers, have exploded into the realm of popular culture in recent years and created a growing demand.
In this country, most dinosaur fossils are found in the vast, rocky, largely arid Western states, like Montana, Wyoming and Nevada, and the Dakotas.
Until recently, scientists on small budgets had little problem in looking for bones on private ranch and farmlands. Landowners had no expectation of being paid for fossils destined for universities and public museums.
But growing demand for fossils has meant escalating competition in bone prospecting.
In the United States, commercial collectors can freely buy and sell bones from private lands.
“For paleontologists, looking for fossils on private land is off-limits from now on,” said Horner.
“Because of that $8.3 million, ranchers sitting on fossil lands are going to think only of what they suppose fossils should be worth now. I had a landowner I had worked with happily for many years call me a couple of weeks before the auction and demand back all of the fossils I had collected on his land.”
Most experts believe the price paid for Sue, perhaps the most spectacular dinosaur fossil in history, was a one-time freakish accident.
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They fear, however, that Sue fostered a public perception that all fossils are extremely valuable. Underscoring that fear is a recent incident at a Montana site where University of Notre Dame paleontologist J. Keith Rigby Jr. is recovering another T. rex fossil.
Late in the summer, Rigby covered the partially excavated fossil under several feet of protective rock and soil, intending to finish the job next summer. Early in September, alarmed friends in Montana called Rigby at Notre Dame, telling him a local rancher was excavating the fossil’s head with an earth-moving machine.
“I’ve lived through the consequences of Sue for the last couple of weeks,” said Rigby in a telephone interview Tuesday night from Montana, where he returned to hurriedly finish his excavation.
Local and federal officials stopped the rancher’s excavation and returned the skull to Rigby. The rancher had once owned the property but several years ago ceded it to the Department of Agriculture in foreclosure proceedings.
“Luckily, I have a lot of community backing here,” said Rigby. “I’ve got a thousand pairs of eyes watching my site when I’m not here, and that saved this fossil.”
Rigby is helping a group to found a non-profit dinosaur museum in the Ft. Peck, Mont., area. He will donate the T. rex and all other fossils he finds in Montana to the museum.
“The problem is,” he said, “every rancher with fossils on his land from now on is going to demand thousands of dollars from any researcher just to look around.
“Commercial exploiters who can make money off these things can pay the price, but university scholars can’t get grant money for that.”
The most productive fossil lands in the U.S., however, are the vast public lands in Western states, and for now, qualified scholars are the only people allowed to take bones from those areas.
Federal law strictly regulates who can look for bones on the half-billion acres of land owned by the federal government. It is limited solely to scientists, excluding all commercial collectors. But commercial operators are lobbying to allow them on federal land, too.
“What the sale of Sue does,” said Louis Jacobs, president of the paleontological society and a professor at Southern Methodist University, “is highlight the need to protect fossils on public lands from being sold.”