Numlock Sunday: Steve Brusatte on dinosaurs auctions and what they mean for science

A ceratosaurus, Jens Lallensack / Wikimedia Commons

By Walt Hickey

Welcome to the Numlock Sunday edition.

This week, I spoke to Steve Brusatte a paleontologist at the University of Edinburgh and the author of books like The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs. Last week, Brusatte offered his thoughts to CNN about the sale of a ceratosaurus fossil to a private collector for millions of dollars. Here's what I wrote about the piece he was quoted in:

A rare Ceratosaurus fossil — one of just four skeletons known to exist — sold for $30.5 million at auction, yet again raising the question of why exactly it’s better for these one-of-a-kind scientific specimens to be acquired by the ultra-wealthy rather than shared for the common good or used for analysis. The original estimate was $4 million to $6 million, with six bidders competing to win the fossil. The skeleton was found in 1996 in Wyoming and was displayed at the Museum of Ancient Life in Utah from 2000 to 2024, but has yet to be formally described in a scientific journal. After all, that kind of price for a dinosaur skeleton precludes any museum or educational institution from ever owning it

Steve and I had the chance to chat when I was reporting my own book — he moonlights as a scientific advisor to the Jurassic World movies, including the latest film Jurassic World Rebirth — and I wanted to talk to him to give him a chance to expand on his really interesting point of view on the manner of dinosaur auctions.

Brusatte can be found at BlueSky and Instagram and his book The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs really is superb.

This interview has been condensed and edited.

Hey Steve, thank you so much for taking the time to chat with me.

My pleasure. Always happy to talk dinosaurs.

Usually, it's the science of dinosaurs that gets me most enthused. When we talk about selling dinosaurs and dinosaur auctions and so on, it’s a trickier issue. But it’s an important one in the field right now.

Yeah. Before we dive in, would you mind just talking a little bit about your background and what you do? You’re a paleontologist, you’re an author. I think people might just be really fascinated to hear a little bit about how you run a crust

Whether or not it’ll fascinate people, I don’t know. But I am a paleontologist, so I am one of those people who gets to dig up dinosaur bones for my job. It’s part of the job, most of my job is teaching and research and running a lab. I grew up in the middle part of America in Illinois, but I live in Stockton. I’m a professor at the University of Edinburgh. That’s my full-time job, but I love to write about fossils, to write about science. I write books; The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs is a book I did a few years ago. Maybe the most fun part of the job is working on the Jurassic World films. So I’m the paleontology consultant on the films. But that’s enough about me, I’d rather talk about the dinosaurs

The reason I’m calling you is that you were quoted in a CNN piece. I thought it was a really interesting debate. I thought that your perspective was really, really intriguing. It was about a recent auction at Sotheby’s, of a Ceratosaurus

That’s right.

And this is a somewhat controversial topic within your field. Do you want to just talk about the issue as you see it?

It’s something that maybe a lot of people might not even think about: who owns dinosaurs?

Somebody finds a dinosaur skeleton somewhere out in the Badlands, in the desert. Who owns it? And what happens between the time that skeleton is discovered and the time that it’s put on display in a museum, or it’s researched in a lab? When it comes down to it, every country has their own laws. There are some countries (China, Mongolia, for instance) where the laws are very strict and almost all fossils that are discovered anywhere are property of the state.

But of course, in the U.S., that’s not the case. If you find something on your land, if it’s a dinosaur, if it’s gold, if it’s oil, if it’s diamonds, it’s yours. It’s basic American culture going back centuries — integral to our property laws. So a lot of the best dinosaurs, the most complete skeletons and the best preserved skeletons come from out west in the U.S.: places like Montana, the Dakotas, Colorado, Wyoming, New Mexico, Utah.

Some of these fossils are found by paleontologists like me. We go out, and usually we’re working on public land that is run by the government, and we have a permit. There are rules to that permit. If we find a dinosaur, it has to go into a museum, and we can study it. But a lot of dinosaurs are also found on private land, usually on ranch land. And in those cases, whoever owns the land can do what they want

Now, traditionally, sometimes the ranchers or other landowners would just let paleontologists from universities and museums look for fossils and take the fossils they find and put them in museums. But over the last few decades, a lot of dinosaurs have started to go up for sale and for auction. This is happening more and more these days. Now, a lot of times, if there’s a dinosaur that’s found on somebody’s private property, it’s put up for sale. And that’s the concern. The concern is not that this is legal and it should be illegal; the concern is that it’s happening a lot more now and some of these dinosaurs are fetching such high price tags. It is making it much harder for scientists, for museums, to get dinosaurs and study those dinosaurs or put those dinosaurs on display for the public to appreciate

Yeah, it almost just seems like it’s gone very major, very quickly. Museums have resources. If museums are competing with millionaires, they can compete. If they’re competing with billionaires, all of a sudden, there are not a lot of dinosaurs for museums anymore

Absolutely. And this auction that just took place is a Ceratosaurus dinosaur, a meat-eating dinosaur. It is an early cousin of T-Rex; it lived about 90 million years or so before T-Rex lived out west in America. A really interesting dinosaur about the size of a Jeep. It had a horn on its head. Cool dinosaur, charismatic dinosaur. The skeleton went for $30 million.

Now, I love dinosaurs. I’m inspired by dinosaurs as much as anybody can be. But $30 million, that shocked me, that was a stunner. But it’s not even a record. There was a Stegosaurus last year that went for auction for over $40 million. So these price tags are high right now, there certainly is something going on in the world of elite collecting among the folks that collect art and collect archaeological artifacts and so on. Dinosaurs are in, they’re in vogue. And when you have people that have the means to buy these things, people that are bidding against each other, the prices can go way up.

We’re in a world where a dinosaur skeleton can fetch $30 million within like five or six minutes at auction; that’s all it took. That’s not a world where museums and universities can get dinosaurs to study and put on display. It’s just not. There’s no museum that I know of, no university that has that money to spend on a dinosaur. If my university had $30 million lying around, they’d put it in the pension, they’d put a down payment on some of the debt they have on the buildings and so on. If this trend continues, the worry really is that dinosaurs will cease to be something that can be studied scientifically, that museums could put on display.

These dinosaurs are unique, these are one of a kind, these things are tens, hundreds of millions of years old, and they really do belong in museums. I feel that very passionately that they belong in museums where they can be conserved because these are fragile old bones. If you don’t know how to take care of them, they will disintegrate into dust. They belong in museums where they can be studied. These, again, are very rare clues from Earth’s history that tell us about the history of our planet, and scientists need to study them, and they belong in museums. First and foremost, so they can be displayed and they can be put out there so that people of all ages, from all walks of life, kids, families, can learn and be inspired. If it’s a world where oligarchs are betting against each other for every dinosaur skeleton, then the conservation, the research and the education are just not going to happen.

The counterargument is, “Oftentimes these buyers will rent it to museums or have them placed in museums or stored in museums.” What’s the argument against that strategy?

That is happening. That’s a good thing, that’s a great thing when that does happen. The stegosaurus last year that went up for auction was purchased by Ken Griffin. That’s a name that many people might know. He runs a major hedge fund and he’s a very wealthy man. Instead of just putting it in his house or putting it in a vault to accumulate value, he’s loaned it to the American Museum of Natural History in New York to put on display. He also funded some research. He gave a donation to support scientific research on the specimen and even to employ a researcher for a few years. That’s great.

Apex, the Stegosaurus in question. DraconicDark, Wikimedia Commons.

Now, it’s not perfect, it’s not ideal. I would rather that the fossil was not owned by a billionaire because the billionaire can do with it what he wants. He could take it off of display at any given time. He could sell it at any given time. But in a world where the law is what the law is (where fossils can be bought and sold), it’s great when the fossil is put on display and when research is supported.

The problem is that’s not the end result of most of these auctions. A lot of these fossils just disappear; they’re bought by an anonymous buyer. We don’t know where they go. They’re gone. They’ve essentially disappeared as objects of scientific study and objects of educational value. They’ve just gone into the ether. Now maybe they’ll resurface someday. Maybe they’ll be put on sale again, put on auction again. But we just don’t know. If every time one of these fossils was put up for auction and was bought, it somehow supported science and supported public education, that would be good.

The reality is that’s just not going to happen. It’s an unusual thing when that happens. And I think that the way forward is not to create new laws that make it illegal to sell fossils. That’s not going to happen in America; it’s never going to happen. It’s just a fool’s errand to go down that path. So what we really need, in my view, is just a cultural mindset where if you’re rich enough to buy a dinosaur, you don’t just keep it yourself. You don’t just see it as something to gather value as part of a portfolio of assets. There’s an expectation, almost a cultural expectation, that you’re going to put it on display. You’re going to support the science. Maybe we can call it a tariff. Why don’t we do that? A tiny, tiny little tariff. We spend $40 million on this dinosaur, put it on display somewhere. Throw a little bit of money into the pot to support the science. I would love if that becomes the norm

I think that anybody who pays even slight attention to the art market would be terrified if a thing that they love and study becomes treated as art. Like, We have seen the Salvator Mundi, a da Vinci, basically up and disappear after its sale. Sometimes these things just disappear.

I’ll pose a question to you real quick. You say when these fossils and these specimens are in museums that they’re being studied. What goes on after a fossil is presented? What study can still be done on these things within a museum setting?

Lots of things. And that’s one of the two great values of museums. First, as we all know, museums display things and the public can go and see them and learn and be inspired. I think what most of us think of when we think of going to a museum is seeing the exhibits, that’s the main thing museums do.

But the second thing that museums do have collections. They have collections that they keep safe and secure collections that are available to researchers to be studied. For paleontologists like me, a big part of our job is going out and finding new fossils, but also going to museums to study the fossils that have already been found because science never dies. We’re always learning new things, and I am constantly going to museums and into the collection looking at fossils that were collected in the 1860s, 1870s.

We now have new techniques, new technologies that we can use to study them. Back then, they didn’t have CAT scanners. You couldn’t put a dinosaur’s skull into a CAT scanner and see inside the brain cap. Back then, they had no idea that some small little proteins and other molecular soft tissues little signatures could be preserved in bones. We now have this. So science is always moving forward. And when museums keep things in collections, the research really never ends. That’s the point of a collection.

Once a fossil is found and it goes on display or it goes into a storeroom or whatever, that’s not the end of it. That’s really just the start of it. And that is one of the main reasons why, as a scientis,t I want fossils to be in museum collections: because therefore they will be available in perpetuity to any scientist that wants to study them. And of course, they’ll be available to the general public to learn from and to be inspired from.

Incredible. Alrighty. It’s a really fascinating topic and I really appreciated your perspective on it. I guess, as we wrap things up Is there any element of this that we haven’t hit on that you think is interesting and worth considering?

I would just say that first of all, my big hope is just that this world of elite collecting moves on to something new and trendy, and they forget about dinosaurs. They go on and they, I don’t know, 19th-century railway carriages — something new to collect.

As you say, if dinosaurs are truly like art, that is a really dangerous path. But regardless of what happens, we need to be pragmatic. We’re not talking about people breaking the law by selling these fossils or buying these fossils. At least from my standpoint, this is not an issue of needing new laws or we need new ruled.

From my standpoint, this is something where we have to deal with the reality that’s in front of us. The reality is that there is a market for these fossils, and I hope that we can promote a culture where if you are rich enough to buy the dinosaur, you don’t just buy it to hoard it away; you support the science.

Alright. So I guess one last question just to wrap it up. Jonathan Bailey, did he nail it or what?

So in the new Jurassic World Rebirth film this summer, I was the consultant on it and had tons of fun. I love doing this work. There’s no better way to reach millions of people around the world than a blockbuster film. And we sneak a lot of good science in there, of course. These are movie monsters. Some are blockbusters but there are a lot of real dinosaurs. The designs are great and they incorporate the latest science. What I loved about this film is not only are there some awesome dinosaurs in there, but there’s a really strong new paleontologist character played by Jonathan Bailey. I love it. He did a great job; I think he really did. The way that a lot of paleontologists are just passion and enthusiasm for what we study. The commitment to learning about how the world works. The commitment of making science available for everybody.

But the thing I’m happiest about is, for 20 some years now, if I meet somebody and they learn I’m a paleontologist, probably 80 percent of the time they say, “Oh you’re just like Ross from Friends.”And I’m like, “Oh my god, that guy’s such a pathetic character.” No.

Well now, you can finally say, “No I’m not like Ross from Friends I’m like Henry Loomis From Jurassic World Rebirth played by Jonathan Bailey from Bridgerton.”

This was wonderful I’m very happy for the profession. This is a big deal. Steve thank you so much for your time. Thank you for coming on. I suppose just to wrap up, where can folks find you and where can they find your work?

So if you want to learn more about dinosaurs, my book The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs is (I would very humbly say) a decent place to start. Otherwise, I’m on most of the social media platforms. On X and Blue Sky and Instagram and stuff. If you’re really into dinosaurs, you can check me out.

But there’s lots of scientists that are online (that are very active on social media) where you can really get it straight in to the veins, just unfiltered, what scientists are doing here and now. And that’s a great way to see what the science we do is really like. Especially at a time like this, when science is just being attacked mercilessly in many aspects of American culture. So check out scientists, try to get to know us, try to see what we’re up to. We’re just people. We’re people that are endlessly fascinated about the world around us.

Alright, hey thanks very much. Perfect spot to end on.

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Edited by Crystal Wang

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