Original article published in "The Week" Magazine
Eric Prokopi (US resident), a self
described “Commercial Palaeontologist”, was arrested by agents from the US
Department of Homeland Security at his home in Gainseville, Florida last
October. Prokopi fell under suspicion after he was identified as the dealer
behind the $1.1 million sale of a Tarbosaurus (a cousin of the Tyrannosaurus
Rex), at an auction in New York last summer. The sale caused an international
furore – the president of Mongolia, where the dinosaur was discovered – tried
to have it stopped, and the skeleton was eventually seized. On 27 December,
Porkopi pleaded guilty to fraudulently importing the dinosaur and agreed to
hand over several others. He faces 17 years in prison.What exactly did he do wrong?
While it is legal to sell fossils and dinosaur remains
once they have been dug up, most countries, Particularly China, Mongolia,
Morocco and Brazil – which between them boast some of the world’s best
paleontological hunting grounds – prohibit the export of skeletons found in
their soil. All dinosaur digs must have permits from the government. Prokopi
was accused of running a “one-man black market” to flout these rules, using
middle men in the UK and Japan to smuggle dinosaur relics out of Mongolia for
sale in the US. A British fossil dealer
from Dorset – who has not been accused of any wrongdoing – allegedly
transported the Tarbosaurus across the Atlantic to Prokopi with a customs form
reading: “pile of reptile bones worth $15,000”.
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| Tarbosaurus Bataar |
What’s driving this market?
Dinosaur remains have been precious objects for centuries
– long before people had any idea what they were. In China, the world’s richest
source of dinosaur bones in the last 20 years, the prehistoric teeth and
strange skulls that turned up in farmers’ fields were thought to be from
dragons that had fallen from the sky and were often ground up for medical
remedies. The modern trade in dinosaur bones began in the 19th
century – a boom then given new life by Steven Spielberg’s film, Jurassic Park,
in the 1990’s. Celebrity dinosaur collectors include Leonardo DiCaprio and
Nicolas Cage, although, as John Miller, a former FBI assistant director says,
many private buyers are simply “wealthy people who want something really
interesting [to] put under their key light in their basement for their 70
dinner guests”.
What’s wrong with that?
Governments argue that dinosaurs found in their territory
are part of their museums national heritage and belong in museums. Mongolia’s
Nemegt Basin, for example, is the only place on Earth where pieces of
Tarbosaurus skeleton have been found in great numbers (the government is
awaiting the return of three, which it hopes to display to the public).
Just as
importantly, palaeontologists despair of the way that commercial diggers –
often local farmers, hoping for a Jurassic jackpot – brutally excavate fossil
remains, focusing simply on relics they know they can sell. T. Rex teeth can
fetch $1000 an inch; a triceratops skeleton sold for $944,167 in Paris 2008.
Is commercial digging really so bad?
People involved in the trade of fossils and dinosaurs
argue that market forces encourage more fossils to be found. There simply
aren’t enough trained palaeontologists, they say, to comb the Earth for clues
of ancient life. So, as well as making money, they bring scientifically
important specimens to life.
What’s the counter-argument?
Palaeontologists point out that fossils and bones dug up
for profit are almost always stripped of vital information about the place of
their discovery. Location and geology can provide researchers with vital clues
about how and when the dinosaur might have died. “A dinosaur out of context is
like a character without a story. Worse than that, the character suffers from
amnesia,” says Jake Horner, a leading American palaeontologist. In most
notorious cases, commercial dinosaur dealers have stitched together multiple
skeletons – Prokopi’s Tarbosaurus was, in fact, several – and even made up of
entire species.
Why isn’t the trade outlawed?
This is the dilemma for palaeontologists and, particularly,
museums. “The barter, sale, or purchase of scientifically significant
vertebrate fossils is not condoned,” say the by-laws of the Society of Vertebrate
Palaeontology, “unless it brings them into or keeps them within public trust.”
And indeed, museums have been the main customers of the dinosaur trade for the
last 150 years – which is why they stand accused of both driving and
complaining about the market at the same time. In 1997, with the help of Disney
and McDonald’s, The Field Museum in Chicago paid $8.3 million for a T.Rex
skeleton called “Sue” – incentivising untrained fossil diggers the world over.
In 2006, Oslo’s Natural History Museum reportedly paid $750,000 for a fossil of
the primate species Darwinius, known as “Ida”, which was presented to the world
as the missing link in human evolution in 2009.So is there anything that can be done about it?
Some scientists argue that all sales of fossils should be
banned, but others fear this would make it harder to keep tabs on the culprits.
That, indeed, is what Prokopi argued: that the first wish of commercial palaeontologists
was to sell to museums and researchers, and that the efforts of the Mongolian
authorities to halt the sale of his looted Tarbosaurus would “only drive the
black market deeper underground”. A possible comprise – proposed by palaeontology
writer Brian Switek in Slate magazine – might be to attempt a form of
regulation, under which commercial dealers would be paid a small finder’s fee
by museums and retain the right to make casts of their discoveries. But, as
Switek admits, “this would require private landowners and commercial collectors
to stop seeing dollar signs made out of dinosaur bones”.
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