At his office, Lieberman displays several impressive specimens, including a three-foot-long Cretaceous herbivore, Psittacosaurus. The rise in prices is fueling the prospecting boom in the Great Plains and West—not necessarily because of a higher concentration of fossils there, but because the American West is one of the world's easiest places to find them.
It also helps that the landscape is dry, so there's not a lot of vegetation covering the rock. And it's erosive, so new rock is constantly being uncovered. While fossils can now be found in stores from Moab to Manhattan, the most unusual and valuable specimens tend to show up at auction houses—or vanish into the shadowy world of private purchasers, some of whom are buying on the black market. At the Tucson Gem and Mineral Show, for instance, it is possible to obtain illegally taken fossils.
The auction houses, of course, make sure their offerings come with documented provenance. Then there's eBay. Very little was disclosed about where any of the fossils came from. In the United States, the law regulating fossil excavation and export is far from straightforward. Property statutes state that any fossil taken with permission from privately owned land may be owned and sold—which is why legitimate excavators usually harvest fossils from individual landowners.
A complex series of regulations apply to fossils removed from federal and state land including Bureau of Land Management [BLM] tracts, national forests and grasslands, and state and national parks and what are known as jurisdictional lands—for example, the public land held by Harding County, South Dakota. To complicate matters, some fossil materials—limited amounts of petrified wood or fossil plants, for example—may be removed from certain public lands without oversight or approval.
In most cases, however, permits are required; applications are reviewed according to a time-consuming process. Prospectors who want to cash in quickly on a single find are often reluctant to abide by the law.
Given that there are nearly million acres of publicly held land in the United States two-thirds of which contain some of the best excavation zones in the world , prospectors who dig illegally are not often caught. We don't have the manpower. In fact, law enforcement officials can barely keep up with prosecutions already underway. Although state and federal officials may not discuss cases currently in litigation, they acknowledge that volume is increasing.
We understand that enthusiasm gets the best of people sometimes. Someone finds an amazing fossil and they take it home. Mostly we just want to recover the fossil—it's government property. But once in a while, we see a case where clearly the intent was criminal: where people were knowingly extracting fossils from public land for private profit.
Those we prosecute criminally. A major criminal case began unfolding in , when a largely intact Allosaurus —a meat-eating older cousin of T. The excavator went to great lengths to look legitimate, including creating bogus letters of provenance. The dinosaur bones were first transported from Utah to a U. In February , the Allosaurus poacher—who had been turned in anonymously—was convicted on one count of theft of federal property.
They took a group of tourists out recently on a fossil-hunting trip, strayed onto public land and extracted fossils from a good site there.
Was it an honest mistake or a calculated commercial move? Frithiof first discovered the specimen's location, then induced the county into a lease, knowing the value of what existed on the property without disclosing it to us," says Ken Barker, a Belle Fourche, South Dakota, attorney retained by the county to prosecute the case. Frithiof sees things differently. It wasn't until the prospective purchaser's survey in , he says, that all parties learned that the Tinker site was on county land.
It was an honest mistake. And I already had a lease on that land with Harding County. We'd been on the Discovery Channel. We'd had prominent paleontologists, like Bob Bakker from the University of Colorado, out to look at it. What we were doing was all out in the open. Nobody thought we were doing anything illegal Frithiof appealed.
The Tinker fossil, they ruled, was Frithiof's property; only the original contract's 10 percent payment was owed to Harding County. The appeals court then sent the case back to Federal District Court for final disposition. Frithiof had no choice but to wait. In the meantime, the location of Tinker—and the fossil's condition—had become a source of contention. Initially found in , Sue was embroiled in controversy almost as soon as the dinosaur was out of the ground.
Williams disputed that the payment was for excavation permission rather than ownership, and other parties from the Sioux to the United States Department of the Interior claimed ownership of the dinosaur.
The FBI raided the Black Hills Institute to take possession of the bones in , the fossils becoming part of a drawn-out legal case that raised additional charges of fossil-collecting malfeasance. While museums have historically purchased important fossils, and some still do, the multimillion dollar sale of Sue indicated that some fossils could go for more than any museum could afford. Suddenly T. The global Covid crisis has also put museums in an especially stressful spot.
Not to mention that researchers could often carry out a great deal of research for the same amount of money. Some experts estimated on Twitter that they could run their departments for years, if not centuries, for the same price that Stan sold for. This spills over to the black market. Actor Nicolas Cage bought a Tarbosaurus fossil—a close relative of T.
Likewise, paleontologists only know what the weird dinosaur Deinocheirus looked like because fossils of this rare and bizarre animal were rescued from the black market. Public sales like Stan are just the tip of the iceberg.
Shane Swindle, an attorney for the Seversons, did not immediately return phone or email messages seeking comment on whether the Seversons plan to appeal to the U. Supreme Court. The dinosaurs unearthed on the ranch include a T. The T. In a legal effort to clarify the ownership of the dueling dinosaurs before trying to sell them, the Murrays sought a court order saying they owned the fossils, sparking the legal battle.
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