[ad_1]
Leading American paleontologists are calling for a global halt to the sale of vertebrate dinosaur fossils. The burgeoning specimen market, driven by their popularity with wealthy private collectors, including Hollywood stars, is pushing prices up and out of reach of museums and scientists, they say.
While the art market is organized around branded artists, sales of dinosaurs all involve star species, with a skeleton of tyrannosaurus in rex worth up to $ 10 million, although the velociraptor be the most popular. The price of the skull of a triceratops is between 170,000 and 400,000 dollars, and that of a diplodocus between 570,000 and 1,1 million dollars. Last year, the complete egg of a aepyornis maximus, also called elephant bird, is sold for $ 130,000, about five times more than what it would have been ten years ago.
Jerry Smith, evolutionary expert on freshwater fish at the Zoology Department of the University of Michigan, said at the Observer"When specimens end up in a private house or collection, our understanding, interpretation or discovery of the new information they contain will never reach the scientific community."
Last year, the US Society of Vertebrate Palaeontology (SVP) asked the Parisian auction house Aguttes to cancel a sale inside the Eiffel Tower that contained only one item. lot: a 29-foot dinosaur of a species still unidentified. The winning bidder paid $ 2.3 million for the coin.
Members of the Company's executive drew attention to the claim that the successful bidder could name the species, calling this statement "misleading, because the designation of a new species is governed by Code rules". international nomenclature ".
"The sale of all fossils is inappropriate," says Catherine Badgley, former president of the SVP, who represents more than 2,200 international paleontologists. "Many fossils, especially vertebrates, are rarely common and certainly not the case of dinosaurs. Merchandising is in principle inappropriate because it motivates unscrupulous people. "
As ARTnews As the magazine pointed out last week, we can thank Steven Spielberg's 1993 film. Jurassic Park for the booming dinosaur market. The initial phase culminated in 1997, only a few months after the film's continuation, The lost WorldSue was sold to Sotheby's for a record $ 8.36 million at the Field Museum in Chicago.
But the interest has hardly diminished. The recent Art Basel Miami included a special project called DeXtinction, organized by two mining companies, Avant Mining and Interprospekt, which included a 120 million year old mother and juvenile allosaurus, as well as a set of 39, well preserved dinosaur eggs dating from the Cretaceous period. millions of years.
According to New York PostIn the Six column, the exhibition drew the attention of Leonardo DiCaprio who, along with Nicolas Cage and Russell Crowe, has carved out a reputation as a collector.
And this is what worries palaeontologists who fear not only the loss of knowledge, but also the diminished appreciation of the work devoted to the discovery, search and reconstruction of a dinosaur skeleton as they become fashionable objects of interior decoration.
The collection of dinosaur fossils carries risks. In 2013, the skull of a tyrannosaurus bataar bought by Nicolas Cage, 67 million years old, was the subject of an investigation into smuggling. Cage had bought it at a California auction, beating DiCaprio with a bid of $ 276,000. It was subsequently discovered that the skull had been obtained from Eric Prokopi, a "commercial paleontologist" who had described it as such and who had previously pleaded guilty to illegally importing fossils from Mongolia and China. from China.
The looted skull was eventually sent back to Mongolia.
All of this still serves to alarm active palaeontologists, who fear that institutions will no longer be listed and that important specimens will be lost to private collections. Badgley reports specimens from the Green River Formation in Colorado, Wyoming and Utah, some of which are some of the earliest known Bataar fossil specimens. "Overall, bat fossils are extremely rare, and even though half of this very early period is in private collections, it's a huge amount of really important information that's lost," says -she.
Badgley's message to collectors is simple: collect by all means, but avoid unique specimens.
"There is no close link between expensive trophy specimens and the increase in paleontological science. Rather, they are perceived more for their scarcity and economic value than for their scientific information. People do not have to be interested in paleontology by having a unique specimen that is theirs and theirs alone. "
According to her, "people are often just as happy about something very common".
Source link
