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Buy Your Own T. Rex Skeleton
NoNsense wrote to us about the team-up of Millionaire.com and auctions.lycos.com are auctioning a complete T. Rex skeleton. Yes, the opening price of $5.8 million includes shipping of the 25-foot-tall, 40-foot-long skeleton. Cool. I was going to buy a new house soon anyway. *grin*
I hope a company is going to buy it and donate it later to some museum. This is done fairly frequently (although usually the museum buys it, given funds by the sponsor), and the more popular the exhibition piece is, the better it is for the donator's image.
You've got to start thinking rich! What's the point of being a millionaire if you're not going to buy a T-rex skeleton when you have the chance?
Maybe they'll allow you to pay in Andover stock?
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
I'm not sure I get this...several places it mentions that the seller is rebutting arguments that it's unethical to sell off a piece of earth's history - and there seems to be a vague feel to the article that it may be unethical.
:)
What's unethical about selling a piece of your own property? He mentioned that the ranch where it was found was going to get something like 10%. I don't know if he's obligated to do that or not, but he's doing it.
What could possibly be unethical about selling a T. Rex skeleton? A scientist made a comment about this skeleton "getting away from science" but I don't think that's unethical...just sucks for the scientists.
-- Truth goes out the door when rumor comes innuendo. -- Groucho Marx
SpinyNorman dun said:
Easier, for many reasons, too...first, Tasmanian tigers (or more properly, thylacines) only went extinct around the 30's (and possibly might not be extinct; there've been reports since the 60's or so of scattered sightings). Secondly, plenty of material where DNA can be gathered from exists (such as thylacine cubs preserved in alcohol, etc.). Thirdly, thylacines are marsupials--there is a limited time where they are in the placenta, and at an early fetal stage they move to the pouch. (This makes it far easier to raise marsupials from DNA, among other things--a foster womb for starters, but after that humans can provide a pouch and milk.)
Yes, there's a reason why I use the term thylacine, btw. "Tasmanian tigers" are no more related to tigers than Tasmanian devils are to wolverines or badgers (thylacines are basically "big predator" marsupials with the same ecological niche as a big cat or solitary canid; Tasmanian devils could well be argued to be "marsupial wolverines" and wombats as "marsupial groundhogs" as they are in roughly the same ecological niches). Less confusion that way. :)
The extinct animal closest to being brought back, btw, are quaggas (a subspecies of zebra that look rather like a cross between a large donkey and a zebra); this is being done largely by crossing together zebra cousins of the quagga that are very quagga-like. This is also, from what I've read, one of the possible tacks that may be taken to breed mammoths (artificially inseminating an Asian elephant with mammoth sperm, giving birth to mammoth-elephant babies, and breeding from there to get animals closer to mammoths). Just FWIW...
-Windigo The Feral (NYAR!)
Some anonymous coward dun said:
Well...I was under the impression Toronto's mascot was a dromaeosaur rather than a tyrannosaur :) (If you notice, the mascot DOES have a sickle claw, and "'raptor" is a slang name for dromaeosaurs.)
Though getting a little tyrannosaur like, oh, Nanotyrannus (which just got proved to be a separate species, btw--more on this below) and somehow genetically engineering its skin to be purple would be probably more acceptable to the sponsors, since we now know dromaeosaurs have feathers. :)
Seriously, though, to get back onto the thread...oddly, the very fossils that proved that dromaeosaurs are feathered and Nanotyrannus isn't actually a baby tyrannosaur are examples of why it is probably a Bad Thing [if you happen to be a paleontologist] to see stuff like T. rex skeletons sold on Ebay. (Even more ironically, the fossil that proved Nanotyrannus wasn't a T. rex is in fact a juvenile Tyrannosaurus rex found along with Nanotyrannus teeth, among other things...more info is here.) It's possible that if, say, the "kid rex" skeleton or the skeleton of Sinosauropteryx [the first feathered non-avian dinosaur skeleton] or Sinornithosaurus [the first feathered dromaeosaur find--terribly important] were sold to a collector-market and sold on Ebay instead of studied by paleontologists we wouldn't know of them (and the Chinese fossils DID almost suffer that fate--they were discovered by paleontologists when a Chinese peasant tried to sell them part of the fossils as curios!)...
-Windigo The Feral (NYAR!)
In any other country in the world, this would be treated as a relic that would at least fall under government regulation. ( It's ironic that encryption products and supercomputers are more tightly regulated than nearly irreplacable artifacts). This T-Rex skeleton is one of the most complete in the world ( if no the most) and has immense scientific value.
Although I don't think the government should have a monopoly on the fossil business, there needs to be better cooperation between scientists and collectors. Though it is unlikely that this particular fossil will ever be lost tract of, there are many other that are.
Or you can give your dog something to chew on.
Jilles
I think one of the microsoft millionaires retired to search for stuff like this. Might be something for him.
Jilles
If you want to prevent "irrevocable damage of our extremely fragile understanding" of history, we should stop the funding of archaeological digs right now. We will be better capable of interpreting the traces of evidence in the future, so we should send the diggers home now. The more traces of the past that archaeologists dig out of places where it's been preserved for eons and put into steel, glass, and wood buildings, the more information they destroy.
First of all, archaeologists are keenly aware of the destructive nature of a dig. However, the technology is not going to be improved unless digs do occur. I believe archaeologists do in fact leave some sites undisturbed for future excavations.
Second of all, the paleontology is very different from archaeology. I've never been on an archaeolgical dig, but I have been on more than one professional paleontolgy dig. The way you find dinosaurs is you walk around a rapidly eroding landscape looking down near your feet. When you see a bit of fossilized bone, you follow the trail uphill to see what is getting weathered out. Most of the time when you find something, erosion is going to expose it and wash it away fairly soon. In fact, it's pretty easy to find bits of cretaceous bone -- just go to the Montana badlands, walk down into low dry creek bed and haul out a few cubic meters of clay-ey dirt. Wash it in a fine screen box, then carefuly pick through the gravel. Chances are you'll find at least a few tiny splinters of dinosaur bone that have been eroded from somewhere upstream. An expert can even give an educated guess as to what species they come from, but it isn't the same as having an intact skeleton to study.
Proper excavation preserves what will be totally lost to science. Putting important specimens in private collections also makes them lost to science. It isn't the glory of the discoverer that is undermined -- it is access by researchers and graduate students.
Send those "scientists" home. They're really out there digging for grant funding anyhow.
This is a particularly odious form of sophistry called "poisoning the well". Researchers are complaining about dinosaurs being sold for money by greedy amateurs, so we'll tar them with the same brush.
So, grubbing for grant money may not be one of the more attractive features of academic researchs, but, guess what? In the real world, you need money to mount an expedition. You need clothing, tools, supplies, trucks, graduate students, air transportation. You need money to preserve the specimen, ship it to a museum, mount it, curate it, and protect it from harm. That money isn't going to just fall out of the sky.
Palentology is about trudging around the desert in 110 degree heat, and spending months doing the equivalent of digging a good sized basement with dental tools. This is not the kind of thing you do for grant money -- there's lots easier ways to make that kind of dough. However, raking in a couple million bucks might make it worth while for the professional treasure hunter.
Despite what you say, you cannot put somebody who does this, then takes the fruit of his work and shares it with the world -- even his worst enemies -- on the same moral footing as somebody who cashes in by selling to some rich moron for use as a conversation piece. And, by definition, anybody who would buy something like this for a private collection is a moron who shouldn't be trusted with anything so valuable.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
There are so few T-Rex specimens around that I think the real shame would be if it wasn't made accessible to researchers. As far as being on public display, most museums have a large percentage of fossil casts (reproductions) on display anyway, not original fossils.
I think it's Nathan Myhrvold who's the dino nut.
Gotta say if I was Gates, I'd be snapping this up for my entrance lobbby (like Jurassic park).
You can see Sue being prepared for display on her webc am.
I hope it's some museum doing the bidding...
--
There would just be something cool about having one of these bought by a city government, handed over to a sculptor who has done some good wildlife studies before. Before you know it, Presto!, the T Rex is put up in front of city hall in a real-life hunting pose, trying to eat the mayor's parking spot. It would look really great!
B. Elgin
B. Elgin
"Read at your own risk; feel free to ignore."
Mary Annings was born in 1799, I believe. Her discovery of the Ichthyosaur, at Lyme Regis, was in 1811. As for what she's doing now, not a lot, I'd guess. :)
All of her discoveries were made at the beach of Lyme Regis, which has blue-green mud cliffs. These cliffs house an amazing collection of fossil treasures, but are extremely dangerous to approach. (Mud slides are frequent - as in every few minutes.) However, this has the advantage that new fossils are forever being brought out to the surface. It's a rare day that you can't walk along the beach and find a hundred or so fossils of every kind. And there's always that chance that yet another new species is in there, somewhere, waiting to be found.
Some resources on Mary Annings:
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
They don't just grow on trees, and I remember what I thrill it was as a kid to look up and see one. Everybody should have a chance to see our natural heritage.
I just hope that whoever buys this has the sense to put it on public display, and that money made on this auction goes toward paleontology and natural history research.
How dare the millionaires blatantly violate the CITES - Convention on the Trade of Endangered Species. Just because they have lots of dough, they think they have the right to drive all the wild animals to extinction.
I think we have to take a stand on issues like this. The US government should ban the import/export of T-Rex bones, and those break the law should punished severely.
If we don't act now, the T-Rex might just disappear from the face of the earth.
Seriously, I don't know if this is good or not. On the plus side, it opens the door to amateur paleantologists in a way we've not seen since Mary Annings.*
On the down side, I doubt this'll end up in any amateur's collection. More than likely, some CEO somewhere will adorn the entrance hall to their multi-million dollar mansion with this skeleton, as a talking piece.
T. Rex is -not- common, and complete T. Rex skeletons are extremely rare. The dangers posed by one of the few skeletons in existance vanishing into the home of some mega-wealthy moron who wouldn't know the difference between a dinosaur and a dog, are frightening. Such deals -should- be actively discouraged or even prohibited. Failure to do so could irrevocably damage our extremely fragile understanding of those ancient times.
*For those who don't know, Mary Annings was a 12-year old who liked discovering entirely new species of dinosaur, for the fun of it. She's credited with the discovery of three entirely new species, and probably had one of the most extensive collections of fossils ever assembled outside of a national museum.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Some anonymous coward dun said:
Barring some miracle (finding some huge tick in amber that was drinking away on a tyrannosaur or deinonych), it's rather unlikely we'll ever find dinosaur DNA from fossils. (Pity too--then it could probably be proven for certain just how close Archaeopteryx and Deinonychus were, and more importantly, how closely related both are to modern birds.)
For starters, most of the fossils like the frozen mammoths and Neandertal skeletons from which DNA has been extracted are actually still bone--they've not been replaced by minerals yet, which isn't the case with dino bones or really ANY remains older than the Ice Age for that matter. (If memory serves, the Australopithecus remains are right at that line where stuff starts turning to rock...pity, because it'd be really nice to get some australopithecine DNA to see how chimplike it was [possibly even enough to prove humans are basically nekkid chimps with big heads who can't walk properly :)]...or to see just what it was genetically that made Australopithecus different enough from other apes to go on the evolutionary path it did)
About the only real chance to find dino DNA is in amber from ticks, and even then it is probably so degraded as to be useless...dinos in ice, one can forget, unless one is talking about very recent remains that we tend to call birds :)
And speaking of birds, dinosaurs, and the tricks to raise them...I'll touch on that below. ;)
I have some nitpicks, but some can be excused as crappy American education ;) Anyhoo...
Nitpick the First: Crocs aren't lizards. Crocodilians, along with thecodonts [the ancestral archosaurs, now extinct], pterosaurs, and dinosaurs [including birds--most paleontologist agree birds are a subclass of theropod dinosaurs--this is going to be important in a few, so remember that little fact] are in a class called Archosauria and in fact are only slightly more related to lizards than mammals and their ancestors, thecodonts, are. (The line that led to "mammal-like reptiles" and theraspids [including mammals] split from diapsids [the line that led separately to lizards and archosaurs] shortly after reptiles in general evolved from amphibians; turtles then probably split first, then lizards, and archosaurs went their merry way shortly after). This one, I'l lgive you, because (thanks to certain fundamentalist groups in the US who shan't be mentioned who tend to throw massive hissy fits whenever evolution is mentioned in the schools) this isn't typically taught outside of paleontology books. :)
Nitpick the Second: Crocs aren't primitive. Protocrocs split off from the main line of archosaur evolution close to the same time as dinosaurs and pterosaurs did, and crocodilians are amazingly adapted to being water predators. (Early crocs were far more gracile, stood more erect, and could even have had roughly the metabolism of monotreme mammals; yes, cold-bloodedness in crocs is thought now to be a secondary trait. The crocodilian cardiovascular system is now recognised as being possibly one of the most advanced, period; it allows crocs to go into suspended animation, among other things, and is again adapted to the crocodilian role as a water predator. These are pretty much the crocs that have survived; many early ones were ground-runners, and are now extinct.) I may give this to you if you don't have the Discovery Channel or somesuch; there was a very good show on crocs that explains just how completely they are adapted as water predators and how much they've changed from early crocs.
Nitpick the Third: Crocs aren't even the most closely related animals to dinosaurs, most likely. (Remember, crocs are very derived, among other things.) The closest group to many dinosaurs is Aves, that is, birds...in fact, feathered dinosaurs have been found, and most paleontologist agree that dinosaurs never went extinct completely at all but that a group of small, toothless theropods adapted for flight survived that we today call birds and that Aves should probably be sunk into either a group in the Dinosauria or even as a subgroup of theropods.
The fact that Dinosauria is a pretty big clade in and of itself (probably as big as mammals at its peak), and further considering that there were possibly groups that gave live birth (this has been theorised for the big sauropods) as well as laid eggs makes things just a bit difficult. The fact that--in essence--what happened to dinosaurs would be equivalent to all species of mammals other than insectivorous bats becoming extinct and evolving into a plethora of bat species over 65 million years also makes things difficult, if you don't want to raise theropods.
In a way, the fact that most dinos DID lay eggs makes things a bit easier; embryo transfer has been done with both bird eggs and crocodilian eggs, and people have successfully clutched croc-eggs (you don't so much need a mom as an incubator) and foster-mom birds have clutched and reared birds in past. Also (surprisingly) even with big Mesozoic dinos, eggs haven't been found that are larger than ostrich eggs (not even for big theropods--it's thought dinosaur babies grew VERY fast, like birds now).
Probably the easiest dinosaurs to raise (were we able to (miracle of miracles) find enough DNA to sequence and end up with something that wouldn't be some gelatinous lump with wings growing out of its deformed head) would be theropods. First off, a subgroup of theropods survives (birds); secondly, recent fossil evidence shows at least advanced Cretaceous-era theropods had hard-shelled eggs like birds and clutched eggs in similar fashion to large birds (an oviraptorid nest has been found with momma-oviraptor brooding her eggs); thirdly, (modern) theropods have been reared without any theropodian mom at all (condors have been reared with hand-puppets and incubated to hatch eggs; the main thing you have to watch for in birds and similar species is imprinting, where they think the first object they see is Mom, which is important if you want to eventually raise baby dinosaurs).
Knowing whether theropod eggs are closer to bird-eggs or croc-eggs is important--croc eggs have to be kept moist and CANNOT be turned, while most bird-eggs mostly have to be kept warm and MUST be turned every so often. It'd also be good to know the optimum temperature range, which would probably require guesswork; croc sexing is dependent on temperature, as is sexing in many kinds of birds including turkeys. (Yes, this is true even though birds have sex-determining chromosomes [which actually work exactly the reverse of ours--ZZ is male, ZW is female]. But then again, there are cases in humans of folks with one set of chromosomes saying they're male but their body developed entirely as female [and vice versa]...so it's not perfect.) A deep genetic search would also be good to make sure whether dinos DID have ZZ/ZW sex differentiation (we'd then know just when chromosomal sex determination evolved with archosaurs; we THINK it evolved sometime after the ancestor of marsupials and placental mammals evolved from monotremes with mammals/therapsids).
(As an aside--they don't even know if they can get enough mammoth DNA to clone. Mammoths are somewhat easy to clone, for extinct mammals anyways; mammoths only went completely extinct around 8000 or so years ago and Asian elephants are fairly closely related. Cloning, say, smilodonts if one found a frozen saber-toothed kitty would be considerably harder; smilodonts are fairly distantly related to all modern cats (they split off around the time cat evolution was good and started), and there's no real guarantee that, say, a lion or tiger could carry a smilodont cub to term. One'd have similar probs if musk oxen were to go extinct completely. Fortunately, with some exceptions, most of your major groups of Ice Age animals were closely related to animals which are still around which makes cloning MUCH easier. ;) Cloning animals that don't require lengthy incubation periods in a uterus is MUCH easier by comparison, because one doesn't have to search so much for foster moms and can worry more about incubation and feeding. :)
-Windigo The Feral (NYAR!)
T-Rex for sale.
Naked and petrified.