Note to users. If you're seeing this message, it means that your browser cannot find this page's style/presentation instructions -- or possibly that you are using a browser that does not support current Web standards. Find out more about why this message is appearing, and what you can do to make your experience of our site the best it can be.

Science 9 July 2004:
Vol. 305. no. 5681, p. 174
DOI: 10.1126/science.305.5681.174b
Prev | Table of Contents | Next

Random Samples

Figure 2 No bids for this Conchoraptor.

CREDIT:S. GODFREY

How many living rooms can hold a giant duckbill dinosaur? Not many, judging from paltry bidding for the skeleton at an auction of fossils last month in New York. That desultory response is just fine with paleontologists, who would prefer to see the fossils wind up in academic settings.

Dozens of potential bidders shied away from the starting price of $300,000, and the dinosaur was just one of many high-priced items passed over at the 24 June auction run by Guernsey's. Jaws from an ancient shark, a megalodon, didn't spark interest at $400,000, nor did a Conchoraptor skeleton from China, starting at $25,000. That was a far cry from the scene 7 years ago, when Sue the Tyrannosaurus rex was auctioned off for $7.6 million (Science, 10 October 1997, p. 218). (The Field Museum of Chicago bought it with help from McDonald's Corp.)

"The dinosaur craze has waned," says Stephen Godfrey, curator of paleontology at the Calvert Marine Museum in Solomons, Maryland, who attended the auction and called some starting prices "astronomical" and "well beyond the grasp" of museums and universities. Some fossils, though, did fly off the auction block, including a pterodactyl that sold for $35,000 and a 19th century humpback whale skeleton that went for $160,000.




To Advertise     Find Products

Science. ISSN 0036-8075 (print), 1095-9203 (online)