Comment Gorgosaurus – or “wilder lizard” – didn’t have to worry about being hunted 77 million years ago when it terrorized the Earth. A cousin of his Tyrannosaurus rex, the dinosaur could span 30 feet and weigh up to three tons. Armed with a mouthful of double serrated teeth, it had no problem stabbing and slicing through the flesh of its prey. But one mass extinction event and several ice ages later, a new threat – bucks – emerged this week to capture one of the 20 known skeletons of the top carnivore, which, like its more famous cousin, stood on two legs and he had a pair of tiny guns. On Thursday, a wealthy collector spent $6.1 million to buy the only known skeleton of a Gorgosaurus available for private ownership, according to Sotheby’s, the auction house that brokered the deal. The sale reignited a long-standing controversy in the paleontological community, which for years has decried the growing commercialization of the field, including the sale of fossils to private buyers. Gregory Erickson, a professor of palaeobiology at Florida State University, told the BBC he feared a multimillion-dollar sale like Thursday’s “sends a message that it’s just another commodity you can buy for money and not for scientific good.” Scientists discover ‘holy grail of dinosaurs’ in Africa Gorgosaurus lived in the late Cretaceous Period, predating T. rex by about 10 million years, Sotheby’s said in its catalog of the skeleton. Although smaller, it was “much faster and more ferocious” than T. rex, which scientists believe was more of a scavenger because its teeth were better suited for cracking bones. The one he sold Thursday died about 77 million years ago in the Judith River area of what is now Chouteau County, Mont. It remained there until it was excavated in 2018 on private property, Sotheby’s said. If it had been found on federal land or north of the Canadian border, the skeleton would have been in the public domain, available for scientific study and public viewing, the New York Times reported. “I am completely disgusted, saddened and disappointed because of the widespread damage to science that the loss of these specimens will have,” Thomas Carr, a vertebrate paleontologist at Carthage College who studies tyrannosaurids like Gorgosaurus, told the Times. “This is a disaster.” It’s a debate that’s been raging for decades. Sotheby’s first auctioned a fossilized dinosaur skeleton in 1997 when it sold a T. rex nicknamed Sue to the Chicago-based Field Museum for about $8.4 million. The fossil got its nickname from Sue Hendrickson, the commercial excavator who discovered it in 1990 in South Dakota. The discoveries shed new light on the day the dinosaurs died In 1998, John Hoganson, paleontologist emeritus of the North Dakota Geological Survey, predicted a tension that would only increase over the next 24 years between scientists like himself, who want to keep fossils in the public domain for scientific study, and those involved to “a booming international market for fossils and the consequent collection and sale of fossils by speculators,” according to CNN. More than a decade later, the private prospecting business was booming, according to a 2009 Smithsonian magazine article titled “The Dinosaur Fossil Wars.” Spurred on by finds like Sue, amateur prospectors flooded the American West and Great Plains in what they increasingly saw as a modern gold rush. Their willingness to exploit everything from a five-inch shark tooth to a once-in-a-lifetime score like a complete dinosaur skeleton has brought them into conflict with scientists and the federal government. “When it comes to digging for fossils, there are a lot more people” than there used to be, Matthew Carrano, curator of dinosaurs at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History, told Smithsonian Magazine. “Twenty years ago, if you met a private or commercial fossil prospector in the field, it was one person or a few people. Now, you go to good fossil sites in, say, Wyoming, and you find quarries with maybe 20 people working and doing a professional job digging up fossils.” Five years later, the researchers warned that the tension had grown and would continue to grow, posing “the greatest challenge to paleontology of the 21st century.” In a 2014 paper, the researchers said new discoveries led to a new “Golden Age” in the field that paleontologists could use to inspire people about their work and science in general. But the researchers warned that these scientists needed to do a better job of communicating the fossils’ value to the general public. The notion that “it’s okay to buy and sell fossils” has become “deeply entrenched,” according to a 2014 article in Palaeontologia Electronica. “The vast majority of the general population is unaware that fossil commercialization is even a problem,” the researchers wrote. Erickson, the palaeobiology professor, told the BBC that the public’s fascination will continue. The multi-million dollar sales are the result of a society engulfed in “dynomania”, fueled at least in part by cultural touchstones such as the Jurassic Park franchise. But, Erickson added, it goes deeper than that. Dinosaurs — T. rex, Stegosaurus, Brontosaurus, Pterodactyl — are some of the first creatures to inspire awe and excitement in children. The frenzy surrounding their fossils, and even the chance to own one, is a way to tap into this wonder again. “Since childhood people have been fascinated with dinosaurs,” Erickson told the BBC, “so I can see why people buy dinosaur fossils.”
