In the US—Shen was unearthed in Montana—fossils discovered on private land belong to landowners, not the dinosaur hunters who scout areas known for being fertile dinosaur bone resting places. The dinosaur hunters dug up Shen’s skeleton with the permission of the landowners before selling it to a collector, who sent it to brokers in Germany to be prepared for sale by Christie’s; brokers are the ones to clean, mount and add casts of missing bones to make the dinosaur complete. In another case of Sue the T. rex, discovered in South Dakota in 1990, the landowner received US$5,000 from the dinosaur hunters, one of whom happened to be Larson.

It’s a “convenient and faulty construct”, according to Paige Williams, a journalist and the author of the book The Dinosaur Artist, who, in a 2018 interview by lifestyle platform InsiderHook, compared rogue excavations to “removing a homicide victim from a crime scene without logging the kind of data that might help an investigator solve the case”. The fragile specimens are prone to damage by dinosaur hunters who may not be professionals or have the proper tools.

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Fossils are sources of crucial scientific data on climate change, prehistoric lives and evolution; and they are rare. Such is the case for T. rex: only about 20 nearly complete skeletons have been discovered in the world, according to Francis Belin, the president of Christie’s Asia Pacific. This becomes particularly problematic when the highest bidder is a wealthy private citizen instead of a museum or research institute, meaning access to the resource for scientific research or education could well be denied.

Many countries have legislation in place to prevent fossils from being exported illegally or studied without the involvement of local researchers, according to a Nature Ecology & Evolution article in November 2021. In China, fossils have been protected by the Cultural Relics Protection Law since 1982, when black market transactions of these Jurassic treasures were becoming increasingly rampant; updated legislation promulgated in 2010 further states that unidentified or unexamined fossils cannot under any circumstances leave the country, and that only a Chinese national can apply to take identified fossils overseas—for exhibitions, for example—and only after strict vetting procedures. The fine for illegally collecting fossils from a protected area, geo parks for instance, is between 300,000 RMB and 500,000 RMB (about US$50,000 to US$80,000).

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This doesn’t discourage private collectors in Asia from trying to own a dinosaur bone through official channels, as the market price for skeletons at auctions is often a fraction of the price of sought-after paintings. The increasing level of wealth in the region further boosts the market. “We see an appetite from Asian collectors for the [fossil] category,” Belin says. “That was one of the reasons we decided to sell the T. rex here. Presenting Shen in Singapore and Hong Kong [would have been] a good opportunity to hopefully have an Asian buyer, and have it shown in Asian institutions.” He adds that currently none of the 20 T. rex skeleton sets are owned by an Asian institution.

There are plenty of prehistoric bones and rocks holed up in private residences and collections in Asia: Calvin Chu, a partner at consulting firm Eden Strategy Institute, claims to have more than a thousand fossil in his collection, including the tooth of a T. rex and a 4.4 billion-year-old rock, one of the world’s oldest, in his Upper Thomson villa in Singapore; Hong Kong conservationist Sharon Kwok-Pong has Pterodactyl, Triceratops and T. rex claws in her personal collection. And that’s without considering the huge number of secretive connoisseurs from mainland China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Thailand, Singapore, Indonesia and the Philippines who have spent tens of millions of dollars on such purchases over the past ten years.

But Christoph Keilmann, the CEO of Higher Visions, the event and exhibition consulting company that was behind the curation of The Big Eight—Dinosaur Revelation at Hong Kong Science Museum that opened in July 2022, thinks that a commercial interest in fossils isn’t necessarily bad news. “Past experience has shown that it is often private individuals who invest a lot of time and money in uncovering and preparing dinosaur fossils,” he tells Tatler. “There are still enough black sheep in this business, but it is getting better.”

Keilmann, has organised dinosaur fossil exhibitions around the world, observes that some renowned museums can no longer afford the time or money required for their own excavations so are buying their exhibits from private dinosaur collectors. He adds that some of the most famous and spectacular dinosaur discoveries in the world were made by private collectors. For example, Trix, the oldest known and third most complete T. rex specimen, was discovered by two amateur palaeontologists, Blaine and Michele Lunstad, who stumbled upon some dinosaur bones on private land in Montana in 2013. Local fossil hunter Clayton “Dino Cowboy” Phipps was called in to confirm the species. The Black Hills Institute of Geological Research informed the Naturalis Biodiversity Center (NBC) at Leiden, the largest natural history museum of the Netherlands, which sent a team of palaeontologists to the site to unearth the specimen. Today, Trix is on public display at the NBC.

Keilmann points out that there are many examples of successful private-public partnerships, where top dinosaur fossils have been excavated by such collaborations, or auctioned off by private individuals to be displayed in public museums and made accessible to science. “If the commercial dinosaur hunters stopped, we would definitely have a lot fewer new discoveries,” he says, adding that the important point is to ensure the proper documentation of the excavation, keep commercial trades legal and fair, and make sure privately owned dinosaurs are accessible for scientific research. “If this is the case, almost everyone is satisfied,” he says.

“Fossils will always awaken an irrepressible explorer in each of us. I call this the Indiana Jones feeling. Palaeontologists, private collectors and commercial dinosaur hunters simply have to continue to work together as equals. Only then will we be able to better understand the past to create a better future for us all.”

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