An Auction of ‘Nature’s Sculpture’: Rare Dinosaur Skulls

Just in time for the new “Night at the Museum” film, two rare dinosaur skulls, one belonging to a 65 million-year-old Triceratops and the other to a smaller relative of the Tyrannosaurus rex, were auctioned on Monday afternoon at Bonhams & Butterfields in Manhattan. The Triceratops’s skull, which is more than 80 percent intact, sold for $242,000, and the other skull, from a dinosaur known as a Tyrannosaurid, sold for $206,000 — both sums far greater than what the auction house had expected. Bonhams is helping a private collector liquidate his collection of “dinosauria” — the umbrella term for dinosaur eggs, teeth, bone fragments and fossils. The auction house would not identify the buyers. Known collectors of dinosauria include Leonardo DiCaprio, Nicolas Cage, Ron Howard and Nathan Myhrvold, Microsoft’s former chief technology officer. Competition can get quite frantic. In 2007, Mr. Cage and Mr. DiCaprio got into a bidding war over of a Tyrannosaurus bataar. Before the 1970s, the dinosauria market had been rather moribund, as few realized that dinosaur specimens could be owned by anything other than a museum. Then the private collecting heated up (not just because of “Jurassic Park”). American private-property laws allow ranchers to buy and sell bones excavated from their properties. Ranch owners call up private companies like the Black Hills Institute of Geological Research to help remove them, a practice that has drawn criticism from paleontologists and other scholars who say the companies are more interested in profit than science...NYTimes