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Have you made the acquaintance of “Gus,” the 38-foot-long, remarkably intact Tyrannosaurus rex fossil skeleton initially uncovered in South Dakota five years ago? If not, sorry. Your chance to meet “Gus” pretty much ended yesterday morning when an unknown private buyer scooped it up at auction for the eye-popping price of $50 million.
Privately held fossils typically disappear quietly into the collectors’ homes. At that point, Macalester College paleontologist Kristi Curry Rogers writes, “access for researchers is no longer guaranteed.” And that’s a problem, because scientific discoveries depend on scientists being able to “revisit specimens, test earlier conclusions and ask new questions.”
Rogers describes a wide range of dinosaur discoveries that scientists have recently made based on fossils that entered public collections decades ago, before the technologies that enable them were invented. “A specimen that seems fully studied today may yield surprising new information tomorrow,” she writes, “but only if it is still available for study.”
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