“We shouldn't have touched it with a 10-foot pole.” “In the end, I wound up contributing to the successful sales pitch of the fossil … along with the other 45 scientific publications on Stan,” he says. He now regrets that decision because the fossil was always in private hands and therefore at risk of being sold. rex.”Ĭarr, for one, included Stan in three studies of tyrannosaur diversity and skull shape earlier in his career. “Stan is one of the keystone specimens for understanding T. “The skeleton of Stan is without doubt one of the very best Tyrannosaurus rex specimens ever found, and it’s been published in the scientific literature many times,” Evans says. rex’s immense bite force to how the skull of T. In addition to selling resin casts to other museums, the institute gave researchers access to the fossil, resulting in a flurry of scientific papers about everything from T. rex, in National Geographic magazine.)įor years, the Black Hills Institute had Stan on display in its Hill City museum. ( Find out more about Sue, the world’s most famous T. While not quite as dramatic, Stan’s sale also stems from a court ruling. rex named Sue, which involved an FBI raid and a legal dispute with the Cheyenne River Sioux. The Black Hills Institute is perhaps best known for its involvement in the collection of-and years-long custody battle over- the T. “The paleontological world is holding its breath” to find out Stan’s future. The ability to repeat experiments is “a tenet of science it's part of our ethical foundation,” Zanno says. ( Find out how scientists are reimaging dinosaurs in today’s “golden age” of paleontology.) Paleontologists fear that if the buyer turns out to be a private collector, researchers and the public could lose access to the fossil, limiting their ability to repeat results such as measurements of its bones or conduct new analyses with more advanced tools and techniques. “This is terrible for science and is a great boost and incentive for commercial outfits to exploit the dinosaur fossils of the American West,” says tyrannosaur expert Thomas Carr, a paleontologist at Carthage College in Kenosha, Wisconsin. fossil trade in National Geographic magazine.) Scientists also have raised concerns about the negative ripple effects the sale could have on the study of dinosaurs by incentivizing people to seek out and sell well-preserved fossils rather than leaving them for paleontologists to study. “If this kind of money invested properly, it could easily fund 15 permanent dinosaur research positions, or about 80 full field expeditions per year, in perpetuity,” he wrote in an email interview. “That’s an astronomical price that borders on absurdity, based on my knowledge of the market,” added paleontologist David Evans, the vertebrate paleontology chair at the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto, who suggested the anonymous buyer could have spent the same funds in a far more effective way to deepen humanity’s understanding of the prehistoric beasts. The day after Stan was sold, paleontologist Lindsay Zanno of the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences described the sale price as “simply staggering.” rex dug up by the same South Dakota institute and eventually purchased by the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago for $8.36 million (equivalent to nearly $13.5 million today). The previous record was set in 1997 with the sale of “Sue,” a largely complete T. rex for a record $31.8 million, the highest price ever paid at auction for a fossil. On October 6, the London-based auction house Christie’s sold the T. Now, an auctioneer’s hammer has thrown Stan’s future into question, with the dinosaur bones sold off to the highest-and, so far, anonymous-bidder, stoking fear among experts that this beloved T. Dozens of high-quality casts of its bones are on display in museums around the world, from Tokyo to Albuquerque, New Mexico. But even if you’ve never been there, chances are good that you’ve seen this particular T. Nicknamed “Stan” after its discoverer, the beast was excavated in 1992 and has long been housed at the private Black Hills Institute of Geological Research in Hill City, South Dakota. More than three decades ago in South Dakota, an amateur paleontologist named Stan Sacrison discovered a titan of the ancient Earth: the fossil of a mostly complete, 39-foot-long Tyrannosaurus rex.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |