For That Special Paleontological Look

GeoDecor’s showroom in El Segundo perfectly sets up an otherworldly prehistoric mood, a flashback to childhood trips to a natural history museum: black walls, nearly frigid air and overhead lights that focus on dinosaur bones and other fossils, some 100 million years old.

But this is not a museum--everything here is for sale. Not just meteorites, minerals and crystals, but fossilized plants, fish and dinosaurs’ bones. A small dinosaur vertebrae on a stand can be had for $150; a large 50-million-year-old fossil palm frond goes for as much as $150,000. While dinosaur and other fossils are routinely sold by collectors at auction and to museums and researchers, it is a relatively new phenomenon for them to be sold to the general public in a retail setting.

“I owned a quarry in Utah with Green River fish fossils that were over 50 million years old. In around 1989, I was approached to format fossil pieces for interior design,” explains Tom Lindgren, co-owner with his wife, Christine, of GeoDecor. From there, it wasn’t a big leap to start selling dinosaur bones as well.

“See this little guy?” asks Lindgren, his eyes resting fondly on a 70-million-year-old Protoceratops andrewsi with a 17-inch-long head. Looking at the skeleton resting on an oak base, it’s easy to imagine that he may have been napping by a dune when was entombed millions of years ago.

“He probably died in a sandstorm, and this is the actual pose he died in. See his legs folded underneath him? This isn’t something man created. All we’ve done is brought out the beauty through our preparation technique.” Not everyone has the space or the money for a full dinosaur skeleton--P. andrewsi was placed for auction at Butterfields Los Angeles last June but didn’t sell. It was estimated to have a value between $75,000 and $95,000.

Lindgren says each piece is extracted by hand from the site where it is found. Hardeners are used on the dinosaur bones while they are still in the ground so that they don’t disintegrate when they hit the air. The bones are then put in plaster casts and transported to a laboratory in Utah, where they are preserved with more hardeners as they are removed from the limestone in which they were found. “Once they are exposed to air, they go pretty quickly unless they are preserved,” Lindgren says.

If it seems a bit odd to see a dinosaur outside of a museum, it’s quite legal under certain conditions--though not without controversy.

“It’s all tied to where the bones come from,” explains Lance Grande, curator at Chicago’s Field Museum, one of the world’s largest natural history museums. “If they come from quarries on private land, they’re legal. If they’ve been poached from public land, they’re not,” Grande explains. “The buyer must ask for documentation to ensure the legality. Like anything else that’s valuable, they can be stolen or faked.”

Grande says that learning the locality of the specimen is important since, from a scientific point of view, a skeleton can be priceless with the correct site information, and valueless without it.

There is clear intrinsic value to the pieces on display at GeoDecor. Mounted and polished, many look like abstract contemporary sculpture--even as they connect the viewer to nature and the land before time.

The source of many of Lindgren’s dinosaur fossils is a private quarry in eastern Wyoming that he had leased. “The [quarry] was the site of a mass death of duck-billed dinosaurs,” Lindgren says. “There was a jumble of bones from thousands of these dinosaurs that had just been washed and piled on top of each other, resulting in a huge bone formation of bones sticking out all along a ravine. Over seven years, we excavated enough bones for 10 dinosaurs. There’s only so many you can sell to museums, because most already have them and they are not new to science.”

Lindgren has sold a number of the individual bones as decorative objects, such as femur bones or parts of tails mounted on pedestals. “It’s quite a conversation piece,” says Lindgren. “I mean, who has a dinosaur bone?”

Lindgren is a self-taught paleontologist whose interest in fossils began as a hobby. He’s been involved professionally in the fossil-mineral world for 21 years and is part owner of Green River Geological Labs Inc. in Logan, Utah, and a member of the American Assn. of Paleontological Suppliers. Through them he has provided specimens for museums throughout the United States. After Tom and Christine married more than a year ago, she convinced him to relocate to Los Angeles from Wyoming to open the now 2-month-old GeoDecor.

Dinosaurs are a small part of GeoDecor, simply because there aren’t that many legal dinosaurs, says Tom Lindgren.

“Most of the property in the West where you find dinosaurs is public land. It was land that people wouldn’t own for its value, like the Badlands of South Dakota. It’s no good for farming, but it’s an unbelievably rich area for fossils. There are a few excavations of dinosaur bones going on on private land right now, but most are offered first to the scientific community.”

The world’s most famous Tyrannosaurus rex, Sue, was sold to the highest bidder by the South Dakota rancher on whose land it was discovered. Following a lengthy legal battle over its ownership, it was auctioned at Sotheby’s in 1997 for $8.4 million. And while the buyer at the auction might have been a private collector who could have taken it out of circulation, it went to Chicago’s Field Museum, where the public can see it and the scientific community has access.

Most of GeoDecor’s sales come from non-dinosaur fossils, such as palm fronds, priced from $10,000 to $150,000. Other items on display include a bony predator fish, a Xiphactinus audax, measuring a- bout 15 feet long, from a species that swarmed the ancient shallow seas in western Kansas during the dinosaur ages. On a lighter note, there are whimsical Jurassic sea lilies that seem to float in their beds of stone.

“Many fossils here came from a subtropical environment time in Wyoming and Colorado. Imagine: palm trees, alligators, flamingo-type birds,” says Lindgren.

The limestone slabs holding the plant and fish fossils are displayed as paintings would be and feature a range of colors from aqua to brownish gold to nearly black--the darker the stone the richer it is in organic material. The slabs are taken out layer by layer with hand tools.

“By preparing, restoring and collecting fossils, whether they’re for museums or private homes, they survive. And from what I’ve seen in the past, private collections usually become part of museums because collectors pass these on,” says Lindgren. “I consider what we do a modern-day treasure hunt.”

Among those who have purchased the pieces for display in their home are Escondido collectors Keith and Judy Roynon, who have three large fossils purchased from the Lindgrens. “Even if you’re not interested in the scientific history of them, their sheer beauty is impressive,” says Keith Roynon. “We have a rare amia fish that’s 52 inches long. It’s quite an architectural piece.” Lindgren says he and his wife consider the pieces “fossil art.”

In the couple’s home, there are pieces incorporated into furniture and on display as art.

“We find that living with fossils and minerals provides a feeling of centeredness, which helps balance us in our busy lifestyle,” says Christine Lindgren. “Their presence gives us a sense of perspective of ourselves in the context of the vastness of time.”

GeoDecor is open by appointment. For information, call (310) 322-4043 or visit the Web site at www.geodecor.com.