rex skeletons in private hands Carr estimates that at least four of them – Stan, Tristan, Tinker and TAD – are currently on public display.
If he could work on these privately held skeletons, he would suddenly have access to tens of thousands of more precious data points.Īs is rumoured to be the case in this month’s auction, private collectors often end up loaning their specimens to museums for public display. rex skeletons held in public institutions. In his research, Carr has worked on around 40 T. “It's a significant number that can really fill in gaps in our knowledge of T. rex skeletons are in private hands – several of those are younger dinosaurs that are particularly crucial to his own research into how tyrannosauroids develop as they grow older. No one knows how many skeletons are in the hands of private collectors, but Carr has been keeping tracking of T. “Fossil specimens that are sold into private hands are lost to science,” the open letter warned.
#Dinosaur t rex bones professional#
After hearing about the planned auction, the body that represents professional vertebrate paleontologists, the Society for Vertebrate Paleontology (SVP), wrote to Aguttes asking for the sale to be cancelled. According to Aguttes, the buyer promised that the skeleton would eventually end up on public display.īefore the auction even started, the scientific world was vocal in its disapproval. After half an hour of bidding, the dinosaur sold to an unknown private buyer for €2.3 million (£1.7m). The fossil, excavated in Wyoming in 2013, is thought to be from the Allosaurus genus of dinosaurs but has significant differences from known species, suggesting that it might belong to an as-yet unknown species. “Each bidder was thinking, raising the bid level, calculating, each one holding their breath,” says Eric Mickeler, who oversaw the auction for Augettes, the Parisian auction house that sold the unidentified dinosaur on June 4, 2018. The only item up for auction was the skeleton of an unknown carnivorous dinosaur, and the buyers gathered in the room on the first floor of the historic monument, or preparing to bid over the phone, knew that the fossil could easily go for millions of Euros. Inside the Eiffel Tower, the atmosphere was tense.
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