This formidable animal ruled life in the Late Cretaceous period and continues to dominate our imaginations in the 21st century. Price tends to be determined by desirability, condition and also aesthetics - the vertebra of a triceratops, for example, has an amazing sculptural quality to it.Tyrannosaurus rex: a name we all know. Individual dinosaur bones can cost as little as a few hundred dollars Like an artwork, dinosaur fossils should be treated with care and respect, but you don’t have to factor in things like UV light damage, and they’re not going to start disintegrating. The missing parts will be replicated with casts. Sometimes it’s done by bone count, sometimes by weight. But even then, there is no industry standard for determining how much of a skeleton exists. If more than half a skeleton is found, it’s considered a big win. Because of the disruptive nature of fossilisation, no complete skeleton exists. Crucially, you need to know that its excavation was authorised.Ĭondition can also be confusing for new collectors. Historical provenance is rare, unless a museum deaccessions something. Most dinosaur fossils that appear at auction are primary-market material, because they’ve come straight from the ground. If more than half a complete skeleton is found, it’s considered a big win rex sold at Christie’s in 2020, had two fused vertebrae, suggesting that at some point it had broken its neck, yet still managed to live on. Other collectors might be interested in certain pathologies, such as skeletal evidence of fighting. But they might not have the space or budget for an entire animal, so instead will buy a representation of each species, such as a leg or a horn. There are collectors who specialise in specific periods: some, for example, will only want Jurassic fossils. But the most popular dinosaurs remain the tyrannosaurus and velociraptor Some countries’ rules can be very confusing, and I’ve known fossils to end up being quarantined by customs inspectors.Ĭollectors may specialise in certain periods or pathologies. Many European countries, and places such as China and Canada, have much stricter rules. Most dinosaurs for sale come from the United Statesĭinosaur bones are found all over the world, but most of those for sale come from the USA, because it has no restrictions on fossil exports. It’s a long and costly process that requires lots of patience and space. I’ve seen dinosaurs transported in seven crates, each the size of a car, and they’re put together by experienced teams using video guides. Shipping and assembling them is also a huge task. Until recently, a stegosaurus skeleton wasn’t worth that much, so there was little incentive to remove entire animals. It costs around half a million dollars to get the bones of a dinosaur the size of a stegosaurus out of the ground, cleaned, stabilised and mounted. The enamel on the teeth also helped to preserve them.Įxcavation of dinosaurs is hugely laborious, involving hundreds of hours of digging with tiny dentists’ tools and brushes On the other hand, a triceratops carcass, which is comparable to that of a small elephant, is the ideal size to float down a river and be deposited under its bed.įootprints are the only evidence we have that certain species existedĭinosaur teeth are quite common, because some large, carnivorous dinosaurs regularly shed them. Enormous dinosaurs such as the brontosaurus and brachiosaurus are much more likely to have been discovered by scavengers or broken up in the geological strata, and are therefore much less commonly found intact. The larger the dinosaur, the less likely it is to have survived intactįactors influencing the likelihood of finding an intact fossilised dinosaur include how common the animals were during the lifetime of their species, and their size. They were most likely killed off over a period of two million years following a catastrophic asteroid collision - and the climate change that followed. The Cretaceous period ends with the dinosaurs’ extinction. This is when some of the best-known dinosaurs, such as the tyrannosaurus and triceratops, lived. In the Cretaceous period, 145-66 million years ago, the land split further into some of the continents we recognise today, causing diverse evolution. The temperature dropped and vegetation increased, leading to the evolution of huge, plant-eating dinosaurs like the stegosaurus. These are the fossils of small reptiles that flourished in the hot, dry conditions.ĭuring the Jurassic period, 201-145 million years ago, Pangea split in two, giving dinosaurs the opportunity to evolve into a wider variety of forms. The first dinosaur fossils date from around 240 million years ago, during the Triassic period, when all the continents were a single land mass known as Pangea. Dinosaurs roamed the Earth for some 175 million years - which means we live closer in time to the T.
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