Wyoming Dinosaurs Sold For $15 Million In Europe, But How Legitimate Are They?

Wyoming dinosaurs are dominating the auction block in Europe. Or at least, unknown portions of them are. 

On Dec. 11, three Wyoming dinosaurs — a Stegosaurus and an Allosaurus duo — were auctioned at Christie’s in London. The trio of "Jurassic Icons" sold for more than $15 million. 

In November, a 70-foot-long Apatosaurus found in Wyoming in 2018 was driven past the Eiffel Tower before going to the auction block at Collin du Bocage and Barbarossa in Paris.

Billed as "Vulcan, the largest dinosaur ever auctioned," it was said to be 75% to 80% "real bone" and sold for more than $6 million.

Dinosaur auctions are an omnipresent concern in the paleontological community as dinosaurs continue to fetch millions of dollars. Apex the Stegosaurus sold for $44.6 million at Sotheby’s in July, becoming the most expensive dinosaur in history.

However, there’s also a growing sense of consumer advocacy among paleontologists who see these specimens for sale.

Their takeaway? Billionaire buyers beware.

“If you were buying a Ming vase at auction, and it was actually made of parts from five Ming vases, and 50% of it was painted plaster, wouldn't you want to know that?” said Denver Fowler, a paleontologist and curator of the Dickinson Museum Center in North Dakota. “But auction houses don't release that information for these dinosaur auctions. It's quite surprising.”

Not As It Seems

Christie’s in London heavily promoted the auction of “three iconic dinosaurs of the Jurassic Period” unearthed in Wyoming. 

Promotion materials tout the “battle-scarred” Stegosaurus and the unique pairing of an adult and juvenile Allosaurus, both excavated from the Meilyn Quarry near Medicine Bow "less than a meter apart" from each other.

“The specimens of Allosaurus sp. preserved with fossil bones of a black colour,” the Christie’s auction description reads. “The adult (consists) of approximately 143 fossil bone elements, the juvenile 135 fossil bone elements, (and) both with additional cast, sculpted and 3D printed material.”

The Allosaurus pair sold for more than $10.25 million, while the Stegosaurus sold for nearly $5.4 million.

Vague descriptions of dinosaur specimens at auction frustrate paleontologists like Fowler. He sees it as deliberate obfuscation to prevent potential buyers from knowing what they’re bidding on.

Typical descriptions for dinosaur skeletons up for auction include “percentage real bone,” “percentage real bone by weight,” “percentage real bone by volume” and similar phrasing.

“They might say a specimen is 90% real bone,” Fowler said. “What they mean is that 90% of the bones by number are real. If there are 50 ribs in the body with 200 bones, that's 25% that’s just ribs. Sometimes, they’ll say something like 90% real bone by weight, which usually means they've got big, heavy bones that make up most of the weight. There are weird ways of describing these things.”

Fowler noted that the term “bone elements” is highly misleading. A bone element could be anything from a complete 9-foot leg bone to an inch-long fragment that isn’t identifiable as anything other than a piece of bone.

An adult Allosaurus skeleton contains more than 300 bones, not including individual teeth. By that count, the 143 fossil elements of the large Allosaurus auctioned at Christie’s means the specimen was 48% real fossil, at the most.

The difference between fossil, cast, sculpted and printed isn’t evident in the specimens. Knowing the difference could make or break the sale.

Follow The Diagram

A simple tool paleontologists employ when excavating and assembling a skeleton is a “skeletal diagram.” They’ll find a skeletal drawing of the dinosaur they’re working on and color in the bones discovered.

Fowler said he regularly makes and updates skeletal diagrams for the specimens at his museum and noted how they’re “conspicuously absent” from the dinosaur auctions he’s seen.

“It takes all of 15 minutes to put one together,” he said. “Auctions don’t do that.”

In the case of the Christie’s auction, there is a paper trail to follow. The Allosaurus specimens have been kicking around the paleontological world for decades.

A team of paleontologists published an abstract on the juvenile Allosaurus in 2003. The specimen is remarkably complete, including all the bones of the arms and neck, most of the backbones and one leg, small portions of the hips and tail, and a significant portion of the skull.

Documents acquired by Cowboy State Daily include a skeletal diagram of the large Meilyn Allosaurus specimen created in 2018. According to the diagram, the larger skeleton is much more fragmentary than its appearance would suggest.

The portions of the skeleton recovered from the large adult include a nearly complete neck, portions of the hips and tail, a single shoulder blade and half of one femur. The only bone recovered from the skull was a single jaw.

In total, there were at least 40 partial or complete fossils of the large Meilyn Allosaurus cataloged in 2018. While many of these were large and impressive pieces of the skeleton, they weren’t enough for a complete skeleton.

Nevertheless, that’s a fraction of the 143 “bone elements” of the large Allosaurus promoted in the Christie’s auction. 

According to the diagram, the fossils from that specimen would account for only 13% of the skeleton and only 27% of the real fossil material, assuming each fossil counted as a single "bone element."

Fowler questioned whether skeletal diagrams would impact these auctions. They would clearly represent how much of a dinosaur is authentic fossil material and how much has been sculpted, replicated or printed to complete it.

“Does it enhance the sale or degrade the sale? If it degrades the sale, I completely understand why they don't provide it,” he said. “They're not obligated to provide it. A person buying a fossil or a painting is supposed to go in there with the knowledge of what they're buying.”

The Same Site

Specimen numbers are used for cataloging and researching archeological and paleontological artifacts. Several paleontologists contacted Cowboy State Daily independently to point out a discrepancy in the specimen numbers shown in the auction photographs.

The skull of the smaller Allosaurus has a specimen number starting with “DMQ.” This has been verified as an abbreviation for “Dinosaur Meilyn Quarry,” referencing the site where the fossil was found.

Meanwhile, one of the claws on the larger Allosaurus has a specimen number starting with “TYA.”

Bill Wahl, a paleontologist and former employee of the Wyoming Dinosaur Center, recognized the number and the claw. It came from the site called “There You Are,” located on private land near Thermopolis and over 200 miles from the Meilyn Quarry.

“TYA was a specimen excavated from a different site near Thermopolis,” Wahl told Cowboy State Daily. “It has nothing to do with the Meilyn Quarry specimen.”

That's further than "less than a meter." 

The "TYA" specimen number suggests the larger Allosaurus is a composite specimen, a mixture of similar-sized bones from different individuals.

Composite specimens are very common in the paleontological world, making up a majority of mounted dinosaurs in museums. However, if the larger Allosaurus is a composite of fossils from the Meilyn Quarry and another site in Thermopolis, it’s not disclosed in any of the auction information.

This raises other incongruities. While the Meilyn Quarry has been placed at the older end of the Morrison Formation, Wahl said the sites in Thermopolis haven’t been dated within the formation.

“If they did mix and match between the Medicine Bow and Thermopolis specimens, they might have two different species reconstructed into a single dinosaur,” he said. “We don’t know what species of Allosaurus was found in Thermopolis, and the Thermopolis specimen was smaller than the Meilyn specimen.”

Wahl also confirmed that he worked on preparing fossils from the larger Meilyn Allosaurus specimen while working at the Wyoming Dinosaur Center. He verified the completeness of the specimen, to his knowledge, via the skeletal diagram acquired by Cowboy State Daily.

Two Faced

ReBecca Hunt-Foster, a paleontologist at Dinosaur National Monument in Utah, said she was perplexed by the appearance of the Allosaurus specimens in the Christie’s auction. They looked like two different animals assembled as one skeleton.  

Specimens recovered from the Meilyn Quarry have been dated as some of the oldest from the Morrison Formation, covering a span of 10 million years of the Late Jurassic Period. During that time, Wyoming’s dinosaurs changed, evolved, and died off.

“What I know about the Meilyn Quarry is that it's stratigraphically low in the Morrison,” she said. “That’s where A. jimmadseni has been found, but the skull of the large Allosaurus looks like A. fragilis, which is a different species.”

A. fragilis and A. jimmadseni are the two species of Allosaurus found in the Morrison Formation. While they outwardly look similar, there are numerous distinctions between the two closely related dinosaurs.

Hunt-Foster noted that while the large Allosaurus has a skull that looks more like an A. fragilis, the skull of the small specimen looks like an adult A. jimmadseni scaled down to fit the size of the skeleton.

Her concern is that Christie’s specimens could be inaccurate reconstructions combining aspects from both species of Allosaurus. That could be partially explained if the large Allosaurus was actually assembled as a composite of two different specimens, and possibly different species, from Medicine Bow and Thermopolis. 

This could also have implications for the identity of the third dinosaur in Christie’s Jurassic trio.  

While Stegosaurus has a much more famous name, Wahl said that fossils of the closely related but lesser-known Hesperosaurus have also been found in the Meilyn Quarry. The Christie’s specimen could be all-Stegosaurus, all-Hesperosaurus, or a composite of fossils from both genera.

Hunter-Foster shared Fowler’s belief that there should be more information on what’s real and reconstructed in dinosaur specimens at auction. Part of her frustration with examining photos of the Christie’s specimens was not knowing what had and hadn’t been replicated to create a complete skull.

“It’s unclear how much of that material is reconstructed and how much is actual bone material,” she said. “I haven't seen a single image that shows what has been fully reconstructed, what is partially reconstructed, and what is actual bone material. I would think someone making a purchase would want to know that.”

‘Mickey Mouse Gloves’

There’s no way of knowing if whoever bought the three Jurassic dinosaurs at the Christie’s auction knew or cared what percentage of their dinosaurs were actual dinosaur fossils. 

Fowler doesn’t care about the price. A single Stegosaurus skeleton might sell for $44 million, but he’s confident it’s not worth that much.

“At auction, the buyer decides what it’s worth,” he said. “If some billionaire finds out that they spent $40 million on a dinosaur and most of it is plaster, they're probably not going to be all that happy about it. Maybe they don't care. But if they care, you don't want that reputation as a seller.”

At this point, Fowler watches these auctions play out with a mix of fury and amusement. While he finds recent record-breaking prices “obscene,” he can’t help but chuckle at the, in his opinion, undeserved reverence bestowed upon these “crappy composites.”

“They have these clowns wearing fancy suits and white Mickey Mouse gloves holding on to these ‘precious fossils,’ when you know all they're holding onto is a big lump of plaster, ever so delicately cradling a thing which isn't even real,” he said.

Wahl recognized his work when looking at photos of the Allosaurus specimens in the Christie’s auction. He used plaster and epoxy to fill holes and reconstruct missing portions of some of the fossils, which were subsequently painted to match the color of the actual fossil.

Wahl’s “sculpting” was done to strengthen the fossils rather than add to their aesthetic appeal. Now, it’s become part of the piece.

“I suppose I should be proud for spying my sculpture at an ‘art auction,’” he said. “These auctions treat dinosaurs like art and sell them like art. I’m a paleontologist. I care about the science of these specimens, but when is it a dinosaur, and when is it art?”

Billionaire Buyers Beware

So, who’s to blame? If the world is flooded with news of multimillion-dollar dinosaurs that aren’t as authentic as they appear to be, who’s at fault?

Ultimately, the auction house sells the specimens based on the information provided by whoever supplies them, whether that be a commercial company or an individual. The auction house may or may not verify that information, but paleontologists believe they should.

“I don't blame the commercial paleontologists for bringing these specimens to the auction houses,” Fowler said. “Many of them are just enthusiastic about fossils and trying to make a living. 

“If they can get millions for these specimens, why wouldn’t they? And I don't blame the landowners. If someone comes up to you and says they could sell a dinosaur for $20 million, I completely understand why they’d agree. It’s a hard living, and I know lots of ranches are struggling.”

Fowler rejects the “media narrative” of the conflicting worlds of commercial and academic paleontology, which he sees as the only story told whenever a dinosaur skeleton hits the auction block. He believes auction houses should be more forthright about what they’re selling.

“Academics fighting commercial people isn’t the story here,” he said. “At this point, it’s become an obscenity with these auction houses. It's not even for real people anymore. It's just the playthings of the billionaires.”

While auction houses keep their bidders and buyers anonymous, the man who paid $44 million for Apex the Stegosaurus publicly revealed himself after the auction. Ken Griffin, a hedge-fund billionaire, has since sent the dinosaur to be displayed at the American Museum of Natural History in New York.

Fowler had similar thoughts about Apex, calling it a “scientifically unimportant” specimen that Griffith ridiculously overpaid to acquire. Even if someone has the money to spend on these dinosaurs, Fowler and many other paleontologists believe buyers should know how much bone they get for their bucks.

“Billionaires might be the only people who are getting screwed here, and maybe no one cares,” he said. “I don’t like to see anyone get ripped off, but I think we should all have a sense of decency and honesty. Do the auction houses have these scruples? Because I question if their buyers know that what they’re selling is lumps of plaster and plastic they're calling a dinosaur.”

Contact Andrew Rossi at arossi@cowboystatedaily.com

Andrew Rossi can be reached at arossi@cowboystatedaily.com.