This week the largest triceratops skeleton ever unearthed goes up for auction in Paris – but museum curators like Francis Duranthon can only dream of getting their hands on such a prize.
With an estimated price tag of up to 1.5 million euros ($1.7 million), Duranthon, who directs the Toulouse Museum of Natural History, told AFP the skeleton would cost 20 to 25 years of his acquisitions budget.
“We can’t compete,” he said.
The triceratops is among the most distinctive of dinosaurs due to the three horns on its head – one at the nose and two on the forehead – that give the dinosaur its Latin name.
“Big John” is the largest known surviving example, 66 million years old and with a skeleton some eight metres long.
It was discovered in South Dakota in 2014 and flown to Italy where it was assembled by specialists.
It is only the latest dinosaur to be sold by the Drouot auction house which, according to its website, handled an allosaurus and a diplodocus each worth 1.4 million euros in 2018.
Last year, they sold a second allosaurus for three million.
That these and other skeletons could adorn the private mansions of the ultra-wealthy rather than museum halls is a common source of frustration.
For Steve Brusatte, a consultant on the forthcoming “Jurassic World” movie, “dinosaur fossils belong in museums.”
The author of “The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs” remembers being a teenager and seeing the fossil that would inspire him to go into palaeontology.
“The T. rex skeleton Sue was put on display at the Field Museum in Chicago,” Brusatte told AFP.
“It awed me and, standing under it, it gave me a new perspective on the ancient world.”
If very rare artefacts go directly into private collections, there could be a loss for the scientific community, said Annelise Folie, curator of palaeontology collections at Belgium’s Royal Institute of Natural Sciences.
“If it’s a new species… we may never even be aware that it existed on Earth,” she told AFP.
It is also impossible to say without investigation “whether a skeleton contains new information or not,” said palaeontologist Nour-Eddine Jalil, of Paris’ Museum of Natural History.
Although, the lure of selling fossils could motivate new archaeological expeditions.
In the case of Big John, the sale is “not a big deal because we already have plenty of triceratops,” palaeontologist Pascal Godefroit of the Belgian Royal Institute of Natural Sciences told AFP.
Scientists had also been able to analyze the bones before the auction.
He said that while scientists can’t force buyers to let them analyse specimens, the two sides are sometimes able to “work together intelligently.”