Inside the Booming Market for Dinosaur Fossils

Two years ago, Citadel's Ken Griffin paid almost $45 million for a stegosaurus skeleton, making it the most expensive fossil ever sold at auction. So why are dinosaur bones joining the collections of millionaires instead of museums? How does the private market for fossils actually work? And how similar is it to the market for art and other antiquities? In this episode, we speak with Salomon Aaron, a director at London-based gallery David Aaron, where he is the gallery's in-house broker for dinosaur fossils. We talk about how fossils are found and priced, what it's like to work alongside dinosaur hunters, how his gallery identifies potential buyers, and why Joe thinks something about the birds-to-dinosaurs evolutionary pipeline is off. Subscribe to the Odd Lots NewsletterJoin the conversation: discord.gg/oddlotsSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Joe Weisenthal?

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• 2:36Tracy Alloway?

  Hello and welcome to another episode of the Odd Lots Podcast. I'm Tracy Alloway.

• 2:40Joe Weisenthal?

  And I'm Joe Weisenthal.

• 2:42Tracy Alloway?

  Joe, when you were a kid, or do your children now, are they into dinosaurs? Did you go through a dinosaur phase?

• 2:48Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah, absolutely. I loved dinosaurs as a kid. My kids are, of course, into dinosaurs. They're really into not only dinosaurs, but telling me which prehistoric animals aren't dinosaurs.

• 2:59Tracy Alloway?

  Wait, does this come up a lot in conversation?

• 3:01Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah, because I'm a troll to them. So I'll be like, what's your favorite?

• 3:04Tracy Alloway?

  Oh, no, Joe.

• 3:05Joe Weisenthal?

  No, but I'll say things like, what's your favorite dinosaur? Mine's the pterodactyl. And then my daughter rolls her eyes like, Dad, pterodactyl is not technically a dinosaur.

• 3:14Tracy Alloway?

  Wait, is that true? I did not know that.

• 3:16Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 3:16Tracy Alloway?

  Wait, explain.

• 3:18Joe Weisenthal?

  It's something I don't understand it. Apparently, it's not technically a dinosaur. It's a prehistoric animal of some different nature that is technically not a dinosaur. Look it up.

• 3:28Tracy Alloway?

  All right, well, learn something new every day.

• 3:31Joe Weisenthal?

  I'm kind of, you know what? I'm going to sound like a crank here. I'm not a flat-earther. But I'm like, sort of, I'm skeptical of dinosaurs. I'm sure they existed, and I know we have fossil records of them, but here's what I don't get, okay? And I know this isn't technically the topic, but I'm just kidding. So it's like, okay, we had all these animals, and they're really crazy looking, these big beasts, and they sort of look like dragons in some cases, or lizards, or gigantic. And then they all went extinct for some reason, prior meteor or something. And then evolution started again. We got a new set, and the new animals don't look anything like the dinosaurs, by and large.

• 4:05Tracy Alloway?

  That's not true. Chickens look like little dinosaurs. Come on.

• 4:08Joe Weisenthal?

  I have, no, they don't. I'm sorry, they don't. They don't. They don't. They don't. I've seen Jurassic Park. I've been to the museum. I love looking at the fossil records. I know what chickens look like.

• 4:18Tracy Alloway?

  No, chickens have a total reptilian vibe. You can see it.

• 4:22Joe Weisenthal?

  I disagree.

• 4:23Tracy Alloway?

  All right. Okay, so this podcast is gonna be-

• 4:26Joe Weisenthal?

  But where's the Tyrannosaurus rex? Like, there's nothing that looks like a Tyrannosaurus. There's nothing that looks like a Brontosaurus.

• 4:31Tracy Alloway?

  Strong disagree. A lot of birds look like T. rexes. Okay.

• 4:35Joe Weisenthal?

  Oh, this is the other thing. They're like, oh, they were birds and they actually had feathers. That's certainly not how they're depicted in like a lot of-

• 4:42Tracy Alloway?

  Well, when you were growing up.

• 4:43Joe Weisenthal?

  A lot of birds look like T. rexes? What?

• 4:45Tracy Alloway?

  Yes.

• 4:46Joe Weisenthal?

  No, they don't.

• 4:47Tracy Alloway?

  They do.

• 4:48Joe Weisenthal?

  No, they don't.

• 4:50Tracy Alloway?

  Okay. This could be 60 minutes of Joe and I arguing-

• 4:54Joe Weisenthal?

  A bird looks like a T. rex? What?

• 4:56Tracy Alloway?

  It does.

• 4:58Joe Weisenthal?

  Come on.

• 4:58Tracy Alloway?

  You need to look at more birds, Joe. That's your problem. Um, okay. Rather than us keep going with this. We're gonna talk about a market, an interesting market. A market that unusually for nowadays is actually going up and is at records. And that is the fossil market, the dinosaur fossil market.

• 5:16Joe Weisenthal?

  Okay, now this I'm very interested. I believe that fossil-

• 5:19Tracy Alloway?

  Now I have your attention.

• 5:19Joe Weisenthal?

  I believe that fossils exist.

• 5:21Tracy Alloway?

  Okay. I'm glad we established that.

• 5:23Joe Weisenthal?

  But I'm also like, you know, I actually was at a dinner once and I met someone who is a commercial fossil pursuer, hunter, collector, whatever. Sounds like they're worth quite a bit of money, or they can be.

• 5:36Tracy Alloway?

  Yeah, so every once in a while-

• 5:37Joe Weisenthal?

  But I don't know anything about it.

• 5:38Tracy Alloway?

  Every once in a while, you see these headlines, like, you know, a new set of fossils or a new set of bones sold for a record price. So the one that jumps out at me because it has a finance angle is Ken Griffin buying a stegosaurus skeleton for, I think, something like $45 million a couple of years back. I think that was the most expensive fossil ever sold. But anecdotally, some of the things I've been reading are saying that fossils are becoming more of a thing. You know, once you get to a certain level of wealth, I guess you get into art or you get into antiquities. Or nowadays, maybe you get into dinosaur bones.

• 6:16Joe Weisenthal?

  Um, there's a, uh, one of those really fancy South Beach hotels. They have a big, full, I forget which din- a big dinosaur thing in their lobby. And I think they even like gold plated it or something. It looks absolutely like.

• 6:30Tracy Alloway?

  Is it a real fossil?

• 6:32Joe Weisenthal?

  I think so. And it's like ostentatiously Miami or something like that. Yeah.

• 6:36Tracy Alloway?

  Oh, wow. Okay.

• 6:37Joe Weisenthal?

  If I had a lot of money and I was done collecting art and I was done collecting rare books, maybe I'd move on to dinosaurs.

• 6:43Tracy Alloway?

  I should just say this, this podcast is not just of interest to people that have millions of dollars to spend on dinosaur fossils. It is also an interesting market structure question and sourcing scenario, I guess. Because as you say, there are commercial dinosaur hunters out there, but there are also a lot of regulations around what you can and cannot sell. There are also a lot of, you know, ethical questions that come up. Should these be in museums or should they be gold plated in a Miami lobby somewhere?

• 7:11Joe Weisenthal?

  You know what else is something interesting? I just looked on the terminal and right now dinosaur future fossils are in backwardation.

• 7:17Tracy Alloway?

  What?

• 7:17Joe Weisenthal?

  No, I made, I made that completely wrong. There's no dinosaur futures. There's certainly not a futures curve. I made that up.

• 7:23Tracy Alloway?

  Oh, my God. I was actually really excited for a second.

• 7:25Joe Weisenthal?

  About that. Yeah, that's just pure fabrication.

• 7:28Tracy Alloway?

  We should, we should request it. Um, okay. All right. Without further ado, I am pleased to say we do in fact have the perfect guest. We're going to be speaking with Salomon Aaron. He is a director at David Aaron, which is a London-based antiquities, Islamic art and dinosaur fossil gallery. So someone who actually buys and sells fossils for a living.

• 7:46Joe Weisenthal?

  I can't wait.

• 7:47Tracy Alloway?

  Sal, thank you so much for coming on Odd Lots.

• 7:50Speaker 05

  My pleasure. It's lovely to be with you both and to have this conversation.

• 7:53Tracy Alloway?

  So maybe just to situate ourselves, is the fossil market similar to the art market or the antiquities market? Is it different in, in some way? Like, give us some comparatives as we think through dinosaur fossils as an asset class.

• 8:11Speaker 05

  With pleasure. Would you mind if I give a bit of context and just build up to the present? Of course, of course.

• 8:19Speaker 05

  The dinosaur fossil market is starting to resemble other areas of the art market, but it's still quite a distance from that point. The principal reason being that it's a very underdeveloped, recent, recently growing and attracting interest market. It's not, it's not, it doesn't have the depth of kind of, kind of research, market parallels, pricing comps, that the other areas of the art market does. And all of the rules relating to how you deal in dinosaur fossils are still being hammered out, kind of, which we can delve into, kind of condition, authenticity, attribution, provenance.

• 9:03Speaker 05

  All of these things are still developing. And so it's true that the market has been booming over the past 10 years. But I think that's changing in a way as the market slightly matures. Hopefully, there's going to be a kind of a flight to quality and a much more differentiation between kind of the great dinosaur fossils that deserve and are finally getting the, you know, the recognition and others which shouldn't be. So it's, I don't know if that in many ways kind of answers your question.

• 9:33Joe Weisenthal?

  No, that's, that's a great place to start. So when we think about the broad universe of, let's just start with the universe of fossils rather than collected fossils. Do we have a sense of like, how many are in museums, private collections, et cetera? And how much is still in the ground yet to be found?

• 9:56Speaker 05

  So I can't accurately answer that question because I don't think anybody really, really knows what's still left to be discovered. I imagine that, you know, we're kind of at the tip of the iceberg and

• 10:08Joe Weisenthal?

  In terms of discovery?

• 10:10Speaker 05

  Yeah, definitely. The, the issue with kind of why more isn't discovered is it's extremely time and kind of labor intensive to discover a dinosaur. You know, you need to be able to excavate at a certain time of the year. It requires a lot of manpower. It's a financial risk because, you know, there are dinosaur explorers that will go, you know, a whole dig season looking for something and come up with nothing and As a result, you know, what's happened is as the market has exploded over the past 10 years, it's becoming much more financially feasible for people to kind of look for dinosaurs and to bring things to the market. So the kind of the rising prices are hugely increasing

• 10:51Speaker 05

  the supply of dinosaur fossils, because it may have been in the past if someone had discovered kind of elements of a of a particular species or a specimen, they'd say, okay, based on the numbers, this isn't worth me spending the rest of my dig season trying to uncover the rest of this. But as the numbers go up, it all becomes more feasible.

• 11:13Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 11:14Tracy Alloway?

  So on this note, walk us through a sort of canonical example, I guess, of a dinosaur fossil being discovered. Like, who actually funds this expedition? Who goes out and tries to find it? And then what happens once they do?

• 11:30Speaker 05

  Okay, so the rules relating to how and where you find a dinosaur fossil vary dependent on country. We only deal in American dinosaur fossils because the rules are very clear. If you find a dinosaur fossil on private land, you can legally sell it, as long as you have the permission of all parties, the landowner, the dinosaur hunter, et cetera. In other countries, it's more shady. They might have exceptions. You might be able to get export permits, but, you know, I'd not recommend anybody to kind of get involved or kind of do that. I'd just suggest focus on American dinosaur fossils. So to talk you through the process or how it works with us, as a gallery, we're a retail gallery,

• 12:12Speaker 05

  we will work with landowners and dinosaur explorers who will kind of go out, you know, in Wyoming or in Montana or, you know, South Dakota or wherever that may be, look for dinosaur fossils and call us or email us when they have kind of images of bones as soon as they're discovered. And The way it works is in some cases, it's the landowner who is entering into agreements with a dinosaur hunter, for example, to split profit. In some cases, it's kind of commercial dinosaur dealers who will acquire ranches or land, hoping to kind of, for the purpose of finding dinosaur fossils on that property.

• 12:55Speaker 05

  And least often is you might buy something from a private collector who bought it decades ago on the market himself. We very rarely do that because the rules relating to provenance have changed so drastically that it's unlikely that somebody who offered a dinosaur for sale a long period of time, decades ago, will have all of the paperwork we would want to see today to feel comfortable with being able to offer it to privates or to museums.

• 13:21Joe Weisenthal?

  What are the rules of provenance?

• 13:23Speaker 05

  As I said, the rules have been developing and different dealers will kind of require different amounts of due diligence. But obviously, the more certainty you have that, you know, you know exactly where and when, by whom, and with what permissions a dinosaur fossil is discovered, the more confidence you have as a buyer. So, for example, we will insist on GPS coordinates, we will need to see land deeds showing that whoever owns it proves their legal title, GPS coordinates as it's discovered, we'll need to have copies of the sale arrangements between the dinosaur hunter and the landowner. We'll need to see, ideally, when it's an important dinosaur fossil, I like to see videos kind of as the piece in situ, you know, in real time is being discovered, so I know

• 14:07Speaker 05

  that bones aren't being added. You know, we'll want to have kind of corroborating statements from everyone on the site, explaining what's been found. We'll want to send experts to the location or visit ourselves to kind of verify everything as it's being excavated. So all of that is kind of, helps to build a picture of where you have complete certainty over when, where, how, and, you know, in whose property the piece, the fossil was discovered. If you kind of rewind 15, 20 years ago, dinosaur fossils may have been exchanging hands where you might just have a signed statement from someone saying, "I found this on my property at, you know, 15 Oak Hill Road," or whatever. But, you know, as the numbers have increased and also kind of just...

• 14:53Speaker 05

  A bit of background, we're an ancient art or antiquities gallery and we deal in Islamic art and we entered the dinosaur fossil market effectively trying to use the, you know, the due diligence rules in those categories and apply them to the dinosaur fossil market. So my original background is, and my kind of my family's background are antiquities dealers where we, when we buy an artwork or a Roman marble, we need to be clear about its provenance, you know, where, how did it enter the market, what proof is there it legally left its country of origin. And unless we're able to show that conclusively with proof, then a buyer or a museum doesn't really have the ultimate security that the piece is legally on the market. So we developed our own internal ways of kind of really a kind of checklist

• 15:38Speaker 05

  for a, for a specimen to make us feel comfortable that it's legal and it's on the sale, on the market legally with no kind of issues relating to its title. Does that kind of build a picture of what you need?

• 15:52Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah, absolutely.

• 15:53Speaker 05

  To buy a dinosaur fossil.

• 15:55Joe Weisenthal?

  Absolutely.

• 16:12Tracy Alloway?

  There are some market stories where you want every detail. Joe and I have made quite a few podcasts on that basis, but sometimes you've only got 10 minutes and just want to know what's moving markets, fast. That's the Barclays Brief Podcast. Every week, experts from Barclays Markets and Research get you up to speed on what's happening and what to watch next. Concise, focused, and brief. Search Barclays Brief wherever you get your podcasts.

• 16:38Speaker 06

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• 17:07Tracy Alloway?

  Do you do third-party testing at all, like thermo luminescence testing for age verification and things like that? Or do you not really need it once you have all the provenance evidence to back it up?

• 17:19Speaker 05

  Case-dependent, but what we really want to do is we try wherever possible to arrange independent third-party consultants, or paleontologists, or specialists to look at the specimen before we offer it for sale. And ideally, a paleontologist who specializes in that particular species. So for example, we recently sold a Jurassic skeleton, which was 150 million years old, and we reached out to the best person in that category and said, could you just review the images? What does this look like to you? And what we also do is arrange conservators to, well, from the art background, to come and check that the bones that we are assembling are reflected accurately on a bone map. And that's something else that I think we'll probably get into is, you know, how do you know what you're

• 18:04Speaker 05

  buying? Because dinosaur fossils aren't discovered completely intact. They're virtually never discovered completely intact. They are assembled from what is discovered, and then that's mixed in with resin parts or 3D-printed bones to complete the specimen, et cetera. And so, anybody buying a dinosaur fossil needs to know what they're buying. And that's something, you know, again, the market is developing over the past 15, 20 years, because it used to be that, well, actually, it still is today, that if you walk into a fossil shop and you say, well, how much of what I'm buying is real bone and how much of it is fake bone? They'll show you a kind of a color book, a drawing of all the bones. And if an element

• 18:45Speaker 05

  of that bone is present, they'll say, oh yeah, we have, you know, we have the fibula, we have the vertebrae, we have whatever it is, we have this claw. And actually, it can be very misleading, because you might actually have 5% of that particular bone. And as a result, an item that looks very complete on a bone map is actually incredibly incomplete. So not only do we kind of insist on having paleontologists, specialists, check that, you know, this is the specimen we're describing, it's being attributed correctly, but also we'll have conservators actually draw up A bone map, which as a gallery, we've designed to show what percentage of each bone is there. And that's one of the kind of issues with the dinosaur fossil market is that, you know,

• 19:30Speaker 05

  somebody could very easily snap a bone in half and kind of double its quote unquote completeness in that bone map kind of process. And so when we, when you asked your first question was, you know, how does this compare or contrast with other areas of the art market? There isn't the same depth of kind of art consultants, advisory firms, et cetera, that are increasing the pressure on vendors to try to keep or kind of, for example, art fairs. You know, if you are a art gallery and you want to exhibit at the best art fairs in the world, there are certain vetting requirements you need to fulfill. And so the dinosaur market doesn't have that same level of scrutiny for now. As the numbers are increasing and there are kind of way more private collectors interested

• 20:14Speaker 05

  in acquiring and building private collections of dinosaur fossils and also new museums being formed around the world, the market as a result is kind of developing new systems to be more transparent and also to better present completeness.

• 20:29Joe Weisenthal?

  Already very fascinating. Just real quick question on North American dinosaurs. You mentioned that a lot of the excavation or hunting work happens in Wyoming, North Dakota, et cetera. Is that because geographically we have reason to believe that there was a high density of fossils there? Or is it because there's a lot of land? Like if there's a dinosaur under New York City, no one's looking for it. You can't dig it up. Is it just because there's a lot of land there that is diggable that's not being used for anything else?

• 20:59Speaker 05

  I think it's all of the above. Ideally, there are climates that make it easier to dig in. Like, for example, you can't dig when it's, when it's snowing. When it's too hot, it becomes quite difficult also. And you need that kind of churn of weather that kind of mixes up the earth and makes it easier. It's all of the above.

• 21:18Tracy Alloway?

  So the other thing I'm very curious about in all of this is the pricing of fossils. Because as you say, in many ways, it's a new market for some very, very old things. But if someone discovers a skeleton, and I take your point that you rarely discover a full skeleton, but let's say you discover something that's kind of unusual in that world, how do you even go about benchmarking it to?

• 21:42Tracy Alloway?

  An actual price that you can sell it for.

• 21:44Speaker 05

  It's a great question. So when my, with my dad, for example, when we're discussing antiquities or Islamic art and we buy, we acquire a new piece, we'll immediately sit down and my dad will say, this is exactly like the one that appeared in 98 at auction. This is exactly like the one that appears in this catalog in 72 and I saw one in Paris, you know, and that doesn't exist. And, and the issue with the dinosaur fossil market is that the prices, and I'll, I'll give you kind of concrete examples, is so all over the place because take, for instance, which was kind of a watershed moment in the dinosaur fossil market, which was the sale of stand. It was a super complete, high profile, widely published iconic T-Rex skeleton acquired by the Abu Dhabi Natural History Museum in 2020 or 2021 at Christie's.

• 22:29Speaker 05

  That made $31 million. The record for a dinosaur at auction prior to that was $8 million.

• 22:36Tracy Alloway?

  Wow.

• 22:36Speaker 05

  In the early 2000s, which was Sue, which was acquired by a consortium of companies and is now on permanent display in Chicago. So, and probably after Sue, there was very few things that actually made $8 million up until Stan. And after Stan, the, the prices exploded and Christie's and Sotheby's started recurrently consigning major dinosaur fossils for sale. And actually there was no logic to why they were so cheap prior to that sale. You know, a lot of it was to do with a lack of visibility that people didn't know you could acquire dinosaur fossils. And what happened with our gallery specifically was we were the first commercial art gallery to actually start exhibiting dinosaur fossils as an art form at an art fair.

• 23:20Speaker 05

  So we acquired our dinosaur fossils, we applied art market due diligence to the acquisition, art market kind of condition reporting to the condition and the preservation, created bespoke art market minimalist stands for the pieces, then showed them at art fairs. And a lot of people would come up to us and say, I did not know you could buy a T-Rex. I did not know you could buy a Triceratops skull. And what the auction houses did was kind of. Pump these items into into the news and into auctions. And then a whole generation of tech bros and private collectors kind of descended on the market with advisors and kind of that contributed to the explosion in prices.

• 24:01Speaker 05

  So to give you an example specifically, you know, there was a complete triceratops scale skeleton that sold around 2022, 2023. Don't quote me on the exact date, but Big John in Paris, which made kind of circa eight million dollars. The prior record for a triceratops skeleton was, I mean, I don't know of any that made more than a million at public auction. I know that Christie's had one that went unsold for half a million dollars 10 plus years earlier. So the price jumps have been extraordinary. And there are many other examples like that where, you know, since Stan, we've had, you know, Hector, we had a raptor that made kind of 12, 13 million pounds. We've had the spec of the Apex, which was bought by Ken Griffin, made 45 million.

• 24:45Speaker 05

  We had the last Sotheby's specimen made 37 million. And these are all numbers which are unheard of in the dinosaur fossil market. So, and the issue is that a lot of these specimens are being either consigned by kind of primary dinosaur hunters or landowners to auction. And then, once they've kind of made this sale, it's very difficult for them to then sell something at the prior prices, you know, five, 10 years prior. So yeah, that's kind of gives you a bit of context about the complete change in pricing structure in this industry.

• 25:19Joe Weisenthal?

  So I take it that finding a complete skeleton is rare. Is there a lot of transaction activity in just like, you know, here's a femur, here's a foot, here's a, here's a nose, like, is that the more?

• 25:33Tracy Alloway?

  You sound so unimpressed. I'd be so excited about a dinosaur femur.

• 25:36Joe Weisenthal?

  Oh, yeah, sure, I would too. But like, are there a lot of transaction? Or do you like, let's say you have part of a skull, like, do you weigh and it's like, maybe we can find some more and like build something? And also, is there like, is it legitimate in your space to create an assemblage? It's like, we have a complete X, but it's from five different dinosaurs, but it is all dinosaur bones. We put them together, like, are, is there anything going on like that?

• 26:03Speaker 05

  So, yeah. Yeah, all good questions. I mean, we so as a gallery, our business model is to deal in very few, but you know, the very best and not to sell composites.

• 26:15Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah.

• 26:16Speaker 05

  And to sell fragments, but only when they're kind of, I think, aesthetic or beautiful or kind of historically interesting.

• 26:22Joe Weisenthal?

  Okay.

• 26:23Speaker 05

  But there are loads of sellers for for the cheaper part, cheaper, kind of smaller bones. And that's a huge market. You can go to mineral shows and you can buy teeth in the hundreds of dollars. You can also buy very much cheaper if you buy non-American dinosaur fossils. And there are there are dealers that will sell composites and everybody will take a kind of commercial decision on whether to assemble something or sell it as a fragment. I prefer where possible to kind of not over restore so that you don't look at something and say, I have a, you know, something which in bone mass or sorry, in in mass is kind of 20% original, 80% resin. I'd rather show a fragment. But yeah,

• 27:05Speaker 05

  look, I can tell you, I personally have, I have a triceratops horn at home. I have a couple of T-Rex teeth at home. So I think they're cool.

• 27:12Joe Weisenthal?

  I'm looking at your website.

• 27:14Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 27:14Joe Weisenthal?

  There's a T-Rex or possibly Gorgosaurus. I never heard of that dinosaur.

• 27:19Speaker 05

  Gorgosaurus, yeah.

• 27:19Joe Weisenthal?

  Tooth for sale for eight 8,500 pounds.

• 27:22Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 27:22Joe Weisenthal?

  This seems affordable.

• 27:23Speaker 05

  Well, you'd get a discount as well.

• 27:24Joe Weisenthal?

  Next time we're in London, Joe. It's a nice big tooth. It looks nice. Maybe I'll get it.

• 27:29Speaker 05

  Yeah, but we're not sure in that one, which of the two it is. So we we kind of cautious.

• 27:34Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah.

• 27:51Speaker 06

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• 28:20Tracy Alloway?

  So just to Joe's question, could I make, could I make a living basically being a dinosaur fossil assemblage person? And then just charging a massive markup as I sort of collect various bones and try to create a fully formed skeleton?

• 28:35Speaker 05

  Yes and no, because this is the thing about the market maturing is that strictly speaking, you know, private collectors should be advised and they should be kind of not acquiring things unless they know for certain that they've been assembled correctly, they are original to the piece and you know, you aren't taking composites. But in recent years, because the market has kind of had so much demand, there are people who have acquired pieces that maybe should not have done or paid prices they shouldn't have done. But that's something I expect to decrease with time because of the increased scrutiny that is, you know, should be coming into these fossils as a result of kind of the higher numbers. Yeah. And then the other thing to say is that it's very competitive. Like if you want to buy a great dinosaur fossil today, you can't just, you know,

• 29:20Speaker 05

  go down a promenade of galleries and you know, you can walk in and say, oh, I'd like to buy a T-Rex. Could you show me what's, you know, behind the curtain? That doesn't exist. I mean, if you, if you want to buy an amazing dinosaur fossil, you know, you're looking at having to kind of pre-buy it, pre-acquire it prior to prepping. So what we do with clients, for example, is a client recently, I sold an amazing complete skeleton. It's either a marsasaurus or it's a completely unknown new species to a private collector who wanted to have it go on public display. So it's being loaned to a, the Coltrister Museum in the UK. And it's kind of something that this private collector wants to be studied and he wants it to be kind of made available to science. And I don't know if his plan at some point will be to donate it or to what his plans is, but he's a very kind of philanthropic person.

• 30:06Speaker 05

  But in that scenario, what we had to do was I met the client years ago. We agreed on the strategy, which was to buy an amazing complete skeleton. Then I consistently sent the client kind of propositions of specimens as they were being discovered. And I said, listen, this has just been found. This is what's been found so far. This is how much the price is to the landowner. This is how much I envision it will cost to prep. You need to pre-buy this if you want this specimen. Because by the time this is acquired and prepped and complete, I mean, you're we're competing against the kind of sovereign wealth fund or kind of petrodollar estates. Tech, it's just a bit much more difficult.

• 30:47Speaker 05

  Sotheby's, Christie's, we will never be able to get a price and it might not be able to acquire it. So that's what people have to do to buy really great dinosaur fossils, usually. It's unusual for someone to be able to kind of walk in and buy something amazing at a kind of reasonable price.

• 31:02Tracy Alloway?

  Actually, that reminds me, but who's the archetypal buyer for these things? And has that shifted over time as the market becomes more prominent, I guess?

• 31:11Speaker 05

  It has. So as you could probably guess, it's very tech, science heavy. So we have clients of all ages, but what's interesting is the dinosaur fossil clients are much younger than kind of the antiquities or Islamic art clients in general. It's a younger demographic and also really skewed towards tech and science. It's a lot of people that grew up with Jurassic Park that find it amazing.

• 31:37Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah.

• 31:38Speaker 05

  I would also add that our gallery is very museum centric. So we try where possible to work with museums. So often, for example, where we can and we always have, we give museums first rights on whatever we find. We consult museum scholars and curators. And also we've had, where possible, actually what we're doing in the dinosaur space is we are introducing private collectors to museums and we are helping museums acquire specimens by kind of, you know, well, finding the private donors to acquire the specimens for the museums. And we had a, one of the ones, because I know that you're going, you guys are going to touch on science and whether or not the, the private market kind of takes away from science and research.

• 32:23Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah.

• 32:23Speaker 05

  So just to kind of jump into that question.

• 32:26Joe Weisenthal?

  It's exactly where I was gonna go next. So yeah.

• 32:28Speaker 05

  I imagined. So obviously, it's very sad in some instances where as a result of the private trade, specimens are not available to museums, or they might be lost to science. But as a kind of commercial dealer, I do believe that on the balance, the public is better off for the private, because of the private trade as a result of kind of so many dinosaurs would not ordinarily be discovered if it were not for the private trade. And also, we have, we try where possible, and of course, no one is perfect. We have managed to make privately discovered dinosaur fossils to be able to find their way to museums as a result of private buyers.

• 33:07Speaker 05

  So last year, we had a high-profile sale of a completely new species which we acquired. We showed to the Natural History Museum in the UK. They loved the specimen. They really wanted it. They said this would be a transformative piece for their collection. And then we placed it on kind of unconditional reserve for them and went out and tried to find a private buyer. And six to nine months later, we found a private collector who agreed to acquire it for the museum and also make funds available for research. So that's an instance where because of the private trade, we've been able to do something good for kind of the public and for the museums.

• 33:45Joe Weisenthal?

  That's cool.

• 33:46Speaker 05

  That we work with.

• 33:47Joe Weisenthal?

  That makes a ton of sense, of course, the fact that if there's a lot of money in the space, then you elicit more discovery and then it's good for science, et cetera. Those agreements where it's like, okay, I buy a dinosaur and then I put it in a museum. Is there a time component? Can I ever take it back eventually? Or like, okay, I agree to place it for 10 years or two years or something? Or am I expected to sort of permanently give it to the museum to hold?

• 34:14Speaker 05

  It's case dependent.

• 34:15Joe Weisenthal?

  Okay.

• 34:15Speaker 05

  So there are a lot of museums that will shy away or completely forbid interaction with the private market. And then there are some which are much more willing or excited to do so. And, you know, I understand, I understand the sensitivities around it, but each museum is different. You know, there are many that will just not. Accept the loan, full stop. But you have to kind of really try to build trust and, you know, for example, be very upfront with the museum. I'm I'm arranging this loan not because I want to increase the value of the specimen so it can be sold at auction in three years' time. And this is how I will make you feel comfortable.

• 34:54Speaker 05

  This is the private buyer. His plan is genuinely to donate it. And it's quite a it's quite an interesting opportunity, really, because as we enter the dinosaur fossil space, you know, we realize that, you know, when you visit an art museum, you look on the walls and you see kind of lines of art patrons. And when you visit the natural history museums, that doesn't really exist because there isn't that same ecosystem for kind of, you know, patron groups or friends or collectors and and that, because it's just a it's a it's a recently developing market. So hopefully, and of course, you know, like with every market, there's the benefits and the disadvantages that the market will kind of cultivate the next generation of patrons that will interact with museums.

• 35:35Speaker 05

  I mean, I don't know what Ken Griffin's plan is for Apex, but, you know, he's as as soon as he acquire as he acquired it, it's on public display in New York. And, you know, I think everyone's kind of enjoying looking at it and visiting the museum. And I would imagine that maybe, you know, that he's thinking in his mind that he was he's going to donate it or gift it at some point.

• 35:55Tracy Alloway?

  Would you expect there to be more speculative interest in the market as it develops? Because that's something we're very used to seeing in the art market, right? Someone buys a painting and thinks of it as an investment, not just something nice to hang on their wall. Are we going to start to see the same thing with dinosaur bones?

• 36:14Speaker 05

  I think we have seen that. People often come to us and say, okay, would you recommend, and I have it with friends, friend, you know, when I meet my school friends, they always say, come on, Sal, find me a bone. And I always say, I I it's kind of consistent. It's a my best friends always, I can't believe you've not found me a triceratops skull. And I always say, you you you you can't, you can't buy as an investor. You have to buy because you love, you love it, you you you're kind of inspired by the history, by the, you know, it's it's it is. It's awe inspiring to set stand in front of a

• 36:45Tracy Alloway?

  Yeah.

• 36:46Speaker 05

  Sixty six million years old creature that roamed the earth and it's it's jaw dropping. But I don't I don't believe in kind of buying for speculative reasons because there are so many unknowns. You know, it might be that America, the US decides to kind of shut the private trade down and suddenly, you know, you may be one of the few people in the world with a triceratops skull in good condition. And suddenly it's worth a hundred times what you paid for it. It it may be that actually property prices go up and no one has the space for a dinosaur fossil in their home anymore. I mean, there's so many variables. There has been a lot of speculative buying and you do see that with pieces that have been acquired at auction. And then six months later or one year later, they are offered for sale again privately as soon as it as soon as the auction is finished.

• 37:29Speaker 05

  And that's not the behavior of kind of a genuine collector who wants to acquire and live with something for decades. Yeah. I really don't enjoy and I, you know, working with people who have that that is their plan. You have to just trust that, you know, you do your research and your due diligence and you acquire at the fair market value. Especially in this space, it's unreasonable and it should be kind of a massive red flag for someone to sell you something, which is kind of under the prices of the current market because it's so competitive. All you can do is kind of acquire at a fair value with an honest description of what you're buying, with an understanding of exactly how good it is, how complete it is. And we can go into, for example, what what to look for when acquiring a dinosaur fossil, like why, what gives it value? Great, tell us.

• 38:13Tracy Alloway?

  Wait, can I ask a question before you go into that more generally? Do bones from carnivores seem to have more value than bones from herbivores?

• 38:20Speaker 05

  Yes, people come to us and say, I want teeth. I want something scary. I want something that I can put in my home. You come around the corner and it gives you the fright of your life. Generally speaking, carnivorous animals, which are kind of meat eater skeletons, T. rex, Gorgosaurus, Allosaurus, juvenile T. rex, juvenile Allosaurus, et cetera. They're way more sought after. They're very competitive. I mean, You know, if I found a T. rex skull in great condition with all the bells and whistles, there's a queue of five, six people kind of waiting for it, ready to acquire it from an email photo, to send money in advance, waiting for it to come. Herbivores aren't as popular, but then again, uh, the iconic herbivores like a triceratops skull is very popular.

• 39:03Speaker 05

  What I hope to happen, and this comes to value, and where we distinguish ourselves from other dinosaur dealers is that I would hope that people kind of increasingly look at actually what they're buying, you know, not just the brand. Am I buying a T. rex? Am I buying a triceratops? No. Or am I buying something that is colored in on a document, a bone map, and described as being very complete? That's not how I would suggest anybody to deal in dinosaur fossils. You need to understand what is the kind of anticipated or the usual condition of that particular type of specimen. So some specimens are usually discovered much more complete than others. So you may buy, for example, I sold a Nanosaurus skeleton, which is a small Jurassic skeleton, about a meter and a half, a hundred and fifty million years old.

• 39:49Speaker 05

  They're usually discovered very incomplete because they're very, they're small, the bones are brittle. There are very few skulls that have ever been found. If you have a Nanosaurus skeleton that might have kind of fifty percent of the bones represented and some of the kind of the feet, the claws or the, you know, there, then that's amazing. But fifty percent of a, a larger herbivore with kind of thick, durable bones like a triceratops is actually not as interesting or as exciting. And also, it doesn't matter how many bones are there, but actually what are the key bones? You know, what are you looking for in value or in kind of historical interest? So T. rex skull.

• 40:27Speaker 05

  Let's say you buy a T. rex skull, but all the teeth are not original. You know, that's a pretty crazy thing to do. Or a triceratops skull, which is iconic because of its, you know, it's the three-horned dinosaur. It's got these amazing horns that, you know, descend out of it, ascend out of its skull. You doesn't matter how many parts, how much of the frill you have, or how much of the kind of lower jaw you have. What you want is you want the, you need those horns to be there. And so what I think will happen over time is that holistically, people will look at dinosaur fossils and say, I don't care. It's not about, is the branding is important, but it's more about, you know, what am I buying exactly? And, you know, forgetting how the industry used to work in the past and actually kind of taking a much more

• 41:10Speaker 05

  measured, slower, deeper kind of investigatory kind of analysis as to what's complete and what's not complete, what's interesting and what's not complete. Sorry that I give you very long answers to each of your questions, but.

• 41:21Joe Weisenthal?

  No, no, this is, there's so much information that it's totally fine. I actually want to go back to something you said, because when we think about market structure, you did say one thing that sort of feels familiar, perhaps, which is that you could get a better shot at acquiring something at a good price if you buy it a little bit earlier in the process. That by the time the dinosaur has been completely excavated and documented and assembled, et cetera, it's going to go to some, you know, rich collector in the Gulf or something like that. Talk to us a little bit more, some of these collectors or people who are waiting for that T. rex skull or whatever. How early can they, if

• 42:06Joe Weisenthal?

  they're so inclined, get in on the process? Can they front money towards a paleontologist who has a good reason to think there might be something there? Can they like, you know, can they buy a stake of an excavation project, period? Like for the active collector? Venture capital for velociraptors. Essentially, yeah, that's, yeah, that's right. VC in some sort, like buy a stake in the expedition.

• 42:33Speaker 05

  Yes, they do. I don't think a private collector should do that.

• 42:36Joe Weisenthal?

  Okay.

• 42:37Speaker 05

  I guess if you can, and you have the money, and it's fun, and it's kind of exciting, fair enough. But, but I don't recommend someone to do it that way.

• 42:44Joe Weisenthal?

  How come?

• 42:45Speaker 05

  Very high risk. You may end up acquiring or finding a dinosaur skeleton that you actually don't have the space for, or you don't want, or is not what you ideally wanted. You know, very hard to manage. You know, if you're, if you're sitting in New York or you're sitting in London, you need to trust that the team that you are working with, I mean, when they find a bone, how do you know they're not putting it in their pocket? You know, how, how do you know you're, I mean, we're talking about really remote places where you, you have no idea. You know, I had a, you know, there are also all types of things. Like there are situations where, you know, you, you acquire something and the seller holds back a couple of bones and then six months later, you get a phone call saying, by the way, I did find a couple of other bones that you would really want to buy now.

• 43:29Speaker 05

  Now, and I'm going to extort you for the, uh, yeah, that's happened a few, too many times to me. So, yeah, I think I've, as a dealer, I feel like I've aged disproportionately to my age. But, but you, you need to kind of work with a small number of people you trust and try wherever possible, because life is short, to, to kind of delegate the headache and the stress and the risk, in my opinion.

• 43:51Joe Weisenthal?

  Is anyone working on bringing dinosaurs back to life?

• 43:55Tracy Alloway?

  This would be the ultimate risk for the asset class.

• 43:57Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah, right.

• 43:58Tracy Alloway?

  Now we have new supplies of dinosaur bones.

• 44:00Joe Weisenthal?

  Well, I mean, I know that's sort of fantastical, right? Because of Jurassic Park, you know, maybe we're going to find a little bit of DNA and some amber somewhere. But it's not like, like, wasn't there something? They brought a wolf. There's some, there was some cover of a magazine recently and they said, oh, this wolf that had gone extinct, we actually like brought it back somehow. Isn't there some work being done on science and reviving extinct species?

• 44:25Speaker 05

  I think there are, there are, there are the obvious ethical issues with it. I mean, you know, when you, once you open Pandora's box and you start kind of bringing back to life, uh, you know, where does it end?

• 44:35Joe Weisenthal?

  Sure.

• 44:35Speaker 05

  People are always talking about it. I even think Elon Musk did a, did a post recently about Jurassic Park. I mean, so I'm sure it will happen in our lifetime. Whether it will be good or not, I don't know.

• 44:44Joe Weisenthal?

  Really, whoa, whoa.

• 44:46Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 44:46Joe Weisenthal?

  You're sure it'll happen in our lifetime?

• 44:48Speaker 05

  Definitely. Don't you think with the kind of advent of AI and aren't we going to be surrounded by dinosaurs in 20 years' time?

• 44:55Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah.

• 44:55Speaker 05

  The Bloomberg office headquarters is going to have triceratops roaming it.

• 44:58Joe Weisenthal?

  Oh, this is, I mean, this is, this is a big call.

• 45:01Tracy Alloway?

  Yeah, this is a big call.

• 45:02Joe Weisenthal?

  I wasn't expecting.

• 45:03Tracy Alloway?

  Particularly from an antiquities dealer.

• 45:05Joe Weisenthal?

  From someone who's a pro is like, oh, yeah, this is definitely coming to Jurassic Park soon. Right about time.

• 45:10Speaker 05

  If I had to bet.

• 45:11Joe Weisenthal?

  You don't see it?

• 45:11Speaker 05

  I bet they're not gonna, they're not gonna reappear, but you know.

• 45:14Joe Weisenthal?

  Okay.

• 45:15Speaker 05

  But I'm just joking.

• 45:16Tracy Alloway?

  I'm certain they would, they would not be as plentiful as to be in the Bloomberg office in our lifetimes. I'm sure of that at least.

• 45:23Joe Weisenthal?

  You know, when you ask a little kid what they want to be, they either want to be like, you know, a popular thing to be a paleontologist. And I can't imagine by and large, there's a lot of paleontology jobs, but given the trends, would you say this is becoming a more plausible career option if there's more money in the space and then more economic reason to find dinosaurs? Could this be that maybe more kids get to live out their dreams of being a paleontologist?

• 45:50Speaker 05

  100%. If you imagine, a lot of these private collectors will set up private museums. And I would go one step further, you know, that's exactly, that underscores the interest in dinosaur fossils because, and this is why we kind of pivoted to this, this market, because if you type into Google, Modigliani or Jeff Koons, and you look at the search results, the number of people who search, have searched for Jeff Koons or whatever, it's totally eclipsed by the searches for a triceratops or a T-Rex. There's universal interest in these dinosaurs. And actually, whenever we do an art fair, we're kind of inundated by children and by people of all ages who come up to us and say, isn't that 50 million? Isn't that 100 million? I say, no, it's, it's actually half a million or, or no, it's a, it's 55,000 pounds

• 46:35Speaker 05

  or, or it's eight and a half, 7,000 for a fast sale. But you know, but, but that's the, that's, that explains why dinosaurs have kind of exploded in price because people, especially children, love them. And they are much more universally kind of admired than a lot of the modern masters or kind of art market categories that will fall out of favor every five or 10 years. Yeah, I agree with you kind of, your call on that.

• 47:00Joe Weisenthal?

  I'll tell my kids tonight that maybe they should, they should go into this.

• 47:04Tracy Alloway?

  Thank you so much. That was-

• 47:05Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah, it's fantastic. Thank you so much.

• 47:07Speaker 05

  Pleasure to meet you guys and thank you for the opportunity.

• 47:10Tracy Alloway?

  Yeah, and we're gonna be in London in May, so we might actually take you up on the offer.

• 47:14Joe Weisenthal?

  We'd love to see it.

• 47:15Speaker 05

  I'm looking forward and yeah, please send me a message and come over and I'll show you some cool things.

• 47:20Joe Weisenthal?

  Great. Take care.

• 47:21Speaker 05

  All the best.

• 47:35Tracy Alloway?

  Joe, that was a really fun conversation. There is something to that final point from Sal, this idea that there is a universality of interest in dinosaurs, right? It feels like everyone, if you have any sort of humanity in you, has gone through a dinosaur stage when you were a kid.

• 47:51Joe Weisenthal?

  Absolutely. And you know, this idea that art will go in and out of style.

• 47:57Tracy Alloway?

  Dinosaurs are forever.

• 47:59Joe Weisenthal?

  Dinosaurs are forever. And so probably from the perspective of a collector or a museum and you wanna have a lot of interest, dinosaurs are the way to go. And then just this idea that I do imagine that there is, and you know, we talked about this, a little bit of anxiety about there being private trade and ownership of them. But if the plus side is that it makes excavation more economically viable, and if in many of these instances, the dinosaurs do end up in museums for scientists to study regardless, it sounds like a win-win for the most part. It sounds pretty good.

• 48:37Tracy Alloway?

  I think there are still some environmental issues. We probably should have talked about this a little bit, but there are still some environmental concerns about large-scale digs. I know the mammoth bone industry, or mammoth tusk, can't talk, industry in Russia has been something of an issue. So that could be also something to think about.

• 48:56Joe Weisenthal?

  A mitigating factor.

• 48:57Tracy Alloway?

  But I do think like crowding in that private capital, I mean, clearly has led to some interesting discoveries already, which Sal was talking about. This idea that they discovered a new species. By the way, I wanna go back to the beginning of this conversation. So Sal mentioned a Nanosaurus skeleton. Here is a Nanosaurus. What does that look like to you?

• 49:22Joe Weisenthal?

  Yes, it kinda looks like a chicken. A little bit, yeah.

• 49:24Tracy Alloway?

  To me, it looks exactly like a pheasant.

• 49:28Tracy Alloway?

  Come on.

• 49:29Joe Weisenthal?

  Ananosaurus looks like a pheasant.

• 49:30Tracy Alloway?

  This is the same. This is the same thing. Okay, great.

• 49:32Joe Weisenthal?

  You're right.

• 49:32Tracy Alloway?

  Capitulation.

• 49:33Joe Weisenthal?

  You're right. You're right. And this is great. This is a good example of a, I wouldn't have made that, but yes, it has those little arms.

• 49:40Tracy Alloway?

  By the way, one other thing. You were talking about the gold-plated dinosaur skeleton in Miami. Our producer, Carmen, points out that it is not, in fact, a dinosaur skeleton. It's a woolly mammoth skeleton.

• 49:51Joe Weisenthal?

  Oh.

• 49:52Tracy Alloway?

  So your kids have more ammunition now to make fun of you for misidentifying dinosaurs.

• 49:58Joe Weisenthal?

  You know, the thing is, I really thought that was, I didn't know. So what's a woolly mammoth? That's not a dinosaur? That's just like another animal?

• 50:04Tracy Alloway?

  It's a hairy elephant. A hairy prehistoric elephant that died.

• 50:08Joe Weisenthal?

  But they were also prehistoric.

• 50:10Tracy Alloway?

  I think so, yeah.

• 50:11Joe Weisenthal?

  Right, that makes sense.

• 50:12Tracy Alloway?

  God, I feel like we're gonna get emails from a million, maybe not a million, a few paleontologists out there complaining about some of our classifications. So I apologize in advance if I got that wrong.

• 50:22Joe Weisenthal?

  I really am very ignorant about this. If it looks like an old animal, I just assume it's a dinosaur. That's my definition of a dinosaur.

• 50:29Tracy Alloway?

  A prehistoric mammal, I think, is, is an accurate way of describing woolly mammoths.

• 50:36Joe Weisenthal?

  Also, look at a pterodactyl. That's a dinosaur. I'm sorry.

• 50:41Tracy Alloway?

  Well, so I looked this up after you mentioned that, because I was very surprised. I did not know this. It's from a category that is very closely related to dinosaurs. So it's the way people make distinctions between like, silosaurus and dinosaurs. I don't really understand them, all those distinctions, but apparently, you know, scientists who are experts in this have agreed.

• 51:04Joe Weisenthal?

  Such that, and it's from the Jurassic period. Okay, whatever. It's from the late Jurassic. It's a dinosaur.

• 51:09Tracy Alloway?

  I have something embarrassing to admit, which is for the longest time, I kept saying petrodactyl instead of tetradactyl.

• 51:15Joe Weisenthal?

  You're not the first, I'm sure.

• 51:16Tracy Alloway?

  All right. Shall we leave it there?

• 51:18Joe Weisenthal?

  Let's leave it there.

• 51:19Tracy Alloway?

  Hey, this has been another episode of the Odd Lots Podcast. I'm Tracy Alloway. You can follow me at Tracy Alloway.

• 51:24Joe Weisenthal?

  And I'm Joe Weisenthal. You can follow me at TheStalwart. Follow our producers, Carmen Rodriguez at CarmenArmin, Dashil Bennett at Dashbot, and Cale Brooks at CaleBrooks. And for more Odd Lots content, go to Bloomberg.com/oddlots, where the daily newsletter and all of our episodes. And you can chat about all of these topics 24/7 in our Discord, discord.gg/oddlots.

• 51:45Tracy Alloway?

  And if you enjoy Odd Lots, if you like it when we talk about the fossil market, then please leave us a positive review on your favorite podcast platform. And remember, if you are a Bloomberg subscriber, you can listen to all of our episodes absolutely ad-free. All you need to do is find the Bloomberg channel on Apple Podcasts and follow the instructions there. Thanks for listening.

• 52:36Speaker 07

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