The super rich, including some of the highest profile movie stars, are increasingly getting into collecting dinosaur bones, but the development has paleontologists worried about the fate of their field.
Actors such as Nicolas Cage, Leonardo DiCaprio, and Russell Crowe have all purchased their own fossils, at times getting into bidding wars with each other, according to The Wall Street Journal.
Cage beat out DiCaprio to buy the skull of a species closely related to the Tyrannosaurus. Crowe actually bought a different skull directly from DiCaprio for $35,000, in what he told Howard Stern was a vodka-fueled late-night transaction.
And in July, billionaire Citadel founder Ken Griffin paid the highest price ever recorded for a fossil: $44.6 million for a nearly complete, 150-million-year-old stegosaurus skeleton.
It was only in 2021, that Sotheby’s auction house launched a department dedicated to science and popular culture, which, in addition to dinosaur bones, sells memorabilia related to space travel and cinema, according to the Journal. In the years since, it has become one of the firm’s hottest ventures.
“I have huge plans for this market,” the department’s global head, Cassandra Hatton told the Journal, and added: “We’re crushing it.”
She suggested that nostalgia for childhood museum visits could be behind the sky-high interest in owning the fossils.
Some of the highest-paying buyers, she said, “remember the day they were at their museum with their grandpa or their uncle or their mom or their sister, and what they’re buying is that excitement.”
However, the wealthy’s burgeoning interest in dinosaur fossils as a collectible trophy has significant implications for the academic study of the prehistoric reptiles.
“What we have is a unique situation where the market has intruded on the domain of the scientific enterprise,” Thomas Carr, director of the Carthage Institute of Paleontology, told the Journal.
He explained that America’s private market for dinosaurs dug up by commercial collectors, which has minimal government oversight, limits the ability of paleontologists to do their research.
While many of the commercial fossils—like Griffin’s Stegosaurus—are lent to museums and available to be studied, many researchers will choose not to publish work on those fossils, since they may not be available later on.
The concern about fossil availability is only greater when it comes to a private collection—even one owned by a celebrity.
“What will happen after he dies?” Carr told the Journal. “Will it get transferred to another private owner, like Nicolas Cage?”
