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Dinosaur Auction In Las Vegas
Xerfas writes "If you ever dreamed of owning your own dinosaur, here's your chance. Possibly the most impressive natural history auction ever is set to take place Oct. 3 at the Venetian Casino in Las Vegas. Here you can find everything from the T.rex to a duck-billed dinosaur and a mammoth skeleton."
You are aware that "trolling" and "trawling" are both methods of fishing, distinct from one another? The internet usage has it's roots in the 1st word.
"As God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly." A. Carlson
You need to read each item description.
An auction house is running it, and as far as I can tell, each item comes from somewhere different - the T. Rex is from Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh, the Shark Jaws from Vito Bertucci, etc.
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
Thats nothing, sometimes you can just ask for a +5 mod.
How about it mods? +5 informative?
--Maquis196
They come from different places. The description of the duck bill dinosaur (hadrosaur) says it had been owned by a Japanese museum which closed, and was then bought by a private American collector who is now selling it.
There's another article here about the auction which mentions the T.Rex also currently being privately owned:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/32705922/ns/technology_and_science-science/
Sign of the recession I guess that some fat cat has to sell his T.Rex.
From Wikipedia
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
The real tragedy is that most of these fossils probably came from private digs. Like archeology, paleontology relies on context. The location where it was found, it's position in the geological strata, other fossils found with it. All these factors can enrich our understanding of these species.
Alan Detrich pulled 'em out of the ground. I can't imagine why you'd worry just because he's a lunatic. He fancies himself a sculptor, he's a staunch proponent of intelligent design who ran for the Kansas Board of Education and famously called those who oppose him "evil-lutionists", and he owns a private fossil excavation company. I can't for the life of me see any reason to be concerned.
"This was an amazing find and no museums were interested in giving anything like a fair value for it. It was eventually sold for $600,000 to someone in Japan."
$600000 is probably as much or more than the entire annual acquisition budget for most museums, other than the very largest ones. Even if the museum had that kind of money they would still have to make the case to spend all of it on one specimen that year (or multiple years). It's not that museums are unwilling to pay for acquisitions, but A) the prices of fossils have been driven up *enormously* in the last couple of decades by increasingly pricey private purchases; B) usually a private donor can get a big, fat tax credit if they do make a donation for free, so it's not like they get "nothing"; and C) even if acquired, big specimens like these often take a lot of renovation of the museum (i.e. more $$$) in order to make space for them to go on display, assuming you have any space left in the building that could be devoted to it (and if you aren't going to publicly display a specimen like this after spending that kind of money, it misses half the point of getting it).
I'm sure plenty of museums were interested, but there are practical issues to consider too, unfortunately.