Scientists Grapple With Collectors Over Who Owns the Bones

For years, private landowners have cooperated with scientists wanting to dig up dinosaur fossils on their property. But the record $8.4 million paid recently at a public auction for a Tyrannosaurus rex fossil already has some landowners seeing dollar signs.

“The sale shows that dinosaurs are wonderfully popular, and that is good for the science, but it is a double-edged sword,” said Blaire Van Valkenburg, a professor of paleontology at UCLA.

Dinosaurs, long popular among children, have relatively recently entered the realm of popular culture, aided by the film and book “Jurassic Park.” As demand for fossils has increased, so has the competition faced by scientists from commercial collectors.

Federal law allows only scientists to excavate vertebrate fossils on the half a billion acres of land owned by the federal government. But commercial collectors are free to prospect for old bones on private ranches and farmland.

*

The price paid last month by Chicago’s Field Museum of Natural History to acquire the fossil nicknamed Sue (after its discoverer, marine archeologist and paleontologist Susan Hendrickson) could put the cost of digging on private land out of the reach of most academics, according to members of the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology attending its recent annual meeting in Chicago.

John Horner, the inspiration for the paleontologist hero of “Jurassic Park,” says at least a dozen ranch owners with whom he has worked for years have recently started demanding money in advance before he can start looking on their land.

In some instances, landowners have asked museums to return fossils they were previously willing to donate to science, said Larry Flynn, an executive member of the paleontology society and president of Save the Fossils for Everyone.

“My phone has not stopped ringing since the articles came out,” said Allen Graffenham, a commercial fossil dealer who heads Geological Enterprises in Ardmore, Okla. “It sends a message to landowners that they have something valuable on their land, and they are going to be reluctant to let university people on their land unless they pay.”

He doesn’t see this as a threat to science. “There are so many billions of fossils in the ground in North America, I don’t believe for one minute that they are a limited resource,” he said.

The problem, according to Lou Jacobs, president of the paleontology society, is distinguishing between the many common invertebrate fossils and a few rare vertebrate ones. That requires a certain amount of expertise.

As concerned as it is about excavations of private land, the society is even more worried about the future of federal land, where the vast majority of North American fossils are found.

Last year, legislation was proposed in Congress to allow commercial collectors onto public land. It never got out of committee, but Jacobs warned that pressure to change the law would increase as the stakes became higher.

“There is no reason for species which already belong to the public to be taken out and sold back to the public,” added Horner, who heads the Museum of the Rockies in Bozeman, Mont.

Horner also fears that Sue’s record sale will give people the idea to go digging for their own dinosaur fossils.

“The most important time for a fossil is when it is still in the ground,” he said. “Once it is taken out, it loses its scientific context.”

Horner, who started his career as an amateur dinosaur hunter, said his museum regularly worked with volunteer enthusiasts to dig up fossils. Such a partnership yielded the museum’s own T-rex fossil, which was discovered by Kathy Wankel in eastern Montana in 1989 while her husband was fishing.

Without expert supervision, amateurs could damage rare fossils and all the clues they contain about a largely extinct world, Horner said.

*

In Glasgow, Mont., authorities in September stopped relatives of a former landowner from using heavy equipment to excavate a T-rex site taken over in a disputed foreclosure.

The fossil, discovered by University of Notre Dame paleontologist Keith Rigby, could provide evidence of a new species of dinosaur. But when Rigby returned to the site after the unauthorized excavation, he discovered that two-thirds of the left side of the skull was missing.

Two of the missing pieces were returned anonymously, and members of the former landowner’s family say they didn’t remove anything from the site.

“I would be very surprised if in the next five to 10 years we didn’t see a lot more damage done,” Van Valkenburg said.