Why rich people shouldn't be buying up dinosaur fossils.

Here's an article about an upcoming dinosaur fossil auction happening in Asia. While experts in the article say it's bad, the article doesn't actually elaborate with enough details.

First and foremost, museums are poor. They don't have the funds to compete with your million or even billionaires when it comes to buying this stuff up. The higher the price these auctions fetch, the more dollar signs appear in people's eyes, causing prices to inflate further. Fossil poaching is a very real thing and a very big issue. While some countries have laws protecting their fossils (such as Mongolia) that doesn't stop people from trying to get rich quick. Fossils are regularly smuggled out of Mongolia and sold on the Black Market. These fossil hunters aren't in it for the science. They just want the money. More on this later.

In America, there are fossils in both private and federal land. Federal land is much more strict, and you need lots of permits and whatnot to even dig there, and I'm pretty sure there are laws preventing these fossils found in federal land to be sold to other countries. The problem is what happens to fossils found on private land. Those fossils can be sold to the highest bidder. It has happened and will continue to happen.

Once a fossil is sold to god knows where there's no telling if that specimen will be available for study. Some people don't like having others touch their collections. Sometimes these fossil buyers don't want people to know they own it, so the fossil disappears. In addition to that, sometimes these collections are sold to other private collectors if the original owner doesn't want them, or they pass away and their family doesn't want to manage the collection. Sure, sometimes there are those rich people that are willing to donate it to museums, but this doesn't stop the price of these fossils from being inflated. Fossil poachers only care about how much they can earn from their find, they don't care who this fossil goes to.

The funny thing is that many of these private collectors are paying outrageous prices for mostly fakes too. Good fossils are extremely rare for a variety of reasons, so when they're found, they're mostly broken or missing many pieces or both! Some of these specimens selling for outrageous prices are probably mostly made of plaster and plastic to fill out the missing elements. There was a recent sale of a very large Triceratop skeleton that fetched $7.7 million, but the experts who saw the original material laughed at the specimen because much of it is fake. We don't even know if it's really as big as they claim since whoever restored the skeleton could easily inflate the size of the animal. The Tyrannosaurus auction I linked to in the beginning claims to be very complete, but they're also being very vague about it. I can tell you right off the bat that the skull is almost 100% fake, with maybe a few tiny pieces of real material. While these fakes probably aren't a great loss to science, this still doesn't change the fact that their sale would inflate the price of fossils. Fossil poachers only care about profits. This doesn't prevent science from losing some really good specimens when they do end up in the hands of poachers.

The red circle is probably the only part of the skull that's real. I know this because the skull is cast from a specimen that is widely seen all over the world. The skull is from a T. rex named Stan. Who, ironically, was also sold to some unknown buyer recently.

While there are some decent enough private fossil-collecting companies that do own a private collection for the benefit of science, what happens if the company goes under or something? The Black Hills Insitute is one such company. It is a private business, and its owners the Larson brothers have a real love of science and paleontology, but this didn't help save Stan the T. rex when, according to rumors, one of the brothers wanted out of the business and decided to sell their prize T. rex skeleton, Stan, in 2021 (or was it 2020, I forget). Stan was available for everyone to study back in the day. There's a lot of data that was collected from Stan, but now, we can't study Stan anymore since it's disappeared. All the data collected also can't be verified anymore. Paleontology is always evolving and changing, a set of observations collected by one researcher might be invalidated by another due to misunderstanding or new data collected elsewhere. So if someone were to try and verify the data on Stan, we can't rely on previously collected data because they can't be verified anymore now that they can't be accessed.

This is even worse if the fossil is collected by people that are just there to get rich. The data in the field where the fossil was collected won't be documented and recorded. If this is a never before seen species, we might not know its country of origin, where the rock formation is located, or figure out what time period it came from. This is literally what happened to Raptorex kriegsteini. There's still debate on whether it's really a valid species or just a juvenile Tarbosaurus. All this because data wasn't carefully collected by fossil poachers. Let's not forget some of them might want to lie about where they found the fossils to avoid getting into trouble with the government.

Fossil poachers also destroy fossils. These people aren't professionally trained experts, so while they might excavate the fossil, they can also destroy important parts due to carelessness, or for profit. Fossil poachers do purposely destroy stuff that they feel isn't worth money or couldn't collect. They might just collect the skull, or claws, or whatever they think will fetch the most money in the fossil market and destroy anything else they don't bother to collect.

I think I'm going to stop here and split this into two sections. This is a very complex subject and this post is long enough as it is.

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