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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."
Cool. I can just imagine the kids yelling "Daddy, I wanna T-Rex!" :-)
From TFA:
Fifty-one million years after the dinosaurs became extinct, Carcharocles megalodon trolled the Earthâ(TM)s seas as an apex predator
Great, as if trolls on Slashdot weren't enough...
This comes down to a fundamental question of who owns fossils, or any natural resources for that matter. I just wonder if 50 or 100 years from now, after someone has long paid for these at auction, that society/courts/prior landowners/native peoples/you-name-an-interest-group will sue for the return of these "stolen" artifacts.
We see this happen with art and antiquities all the time. Those things taken from their original home, either in time of war or time of peace are destined to be fought over years later. So how long will it be before society changes and it seems reasonable that one interest group gets enough support and whomever purchases the fossils will be forced to give them back, perhaps even without getting their money back.
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Other than the TRex, the prices were not all that bad. Sure, out of my price range. But $500k for a triceratops (I know its something else) seems pretty good.
From TFA:
Fifty-one million years after the dinosaurs became extinct, Carcharocles megalodon trolled the Earth's seas as an apex predator
Great, as if trolls on Slashdot weren't enough...
Yeah, that's just plain bad editing. I'm pretty sure the word they were looking for is trawled which is a homophone as it is pronounced the same as "troll." Having done a lot of fishing in my youth this is a common mistake and I actually thought that internet 'trolling' was called that because it's like fishing for a response in the open waters of the internet. I know that's not the case but it seems a more appropriate origin than some fantasy description of a grotesque creature.
Oh well, I've never read Wired for their editing. Heck with their layout and ads I don't read them much more at all. I suppose that's just personal preference though.
My work here is dung.
Wake me up when I can buy a prehistoric shark with a frikkin' slingshot.
Finally had enough. Come see us over at https://soylentnews.org/
Not alive? And I was going to try to win "Best Dad Ever!" over the guy who built the canon.
"As God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly." A. Carlson
I understand one of the least interesting lots is a Corporate IT dept complete with a well preserved version of I.E.6
(Please feel free to mod down as 'Troll')
Smivs on the intertubes!
I cannot figure out who is selling these things. Was it a private collector, professional fossil collectors, or did some museum go bust? I suppose that the auction house is not obligated to identify the seller, but it would interesting to know.
The more people I meet, the better I like my dog.
This comes down to a fundamental question of who owns fossils, or any natural resources for that matter. I just wonder if 50 or 100 years from now, after someone has long paid for these at auction, that society/courts/prior landowners/native peoples/you-name-an-interest-group will sue for the return of these "stolen" artifacts.
We see this happen with art and antiquities all the time. Those things taken from their original home, either in time of war or time of peace are destined to be fought over years later. So how long will it be before society changes and it seems reasonable that one interest group gets enough support and whomever purchases the fossils will be forced to give them back, perhaps even without getting their money back.
In the United States, fossils are owned by the person/entity/organization/government that owns the land they are found on. If you read each of the descriptions they tell you where the fossils were dug up. That makes a lot of paleontologists mad but that's the way it is. Read this article:
In the United States and many other countries, fossil specimens collected on private land become the property of the landowner. Trade in these fossils is entirely legal. While many academics and institutions oppose fossil trade in any form, others take a different stance.
Now, I think I remember reading of cases where fossils were found in places like Yosemite and illegally excavated and sold illegally but that's because the state park owned them.
Your analogy of ill-gotten wartime loot is kind of funny. When the descendants of dinosaurs come looking for their ancestors bones, we will have to cough them up.
My work here is dung.
Assertions that these "dinosaur" "fossils" are really the bones of early species are just a con. The Universe was created approximately 6000 years ago and these so-called fossils were placed in the earth by God to test our faith. He's trying to find out if we can be tricked into using those tools of Satan, logic and evidence.
Good Creationists could call the Las Vegas police and have this auction of fraudulent material shut down for making false claims about the age of the items for sale.
I piss off bigots.
Only believe what you read, not what you see.
Dangerous thought citizen... you meant to say "... Only believe what we tell you is OK to read..."
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
Finally! my chance to buy another Vegasaurus has come! I hope the machine's been fixed by now.
"And then, of course, you have those who say that the "creation in six days" is not to be taken literally. "
If you can get your friendly neighborhood creationist to allow for this, that's the compromise I can usually live with for conversation. Replacing "day" which we are now pretty fierce calling 24 hours with "day" from "In *MY* day we didn't have lawns, we had to assemble the biocarbon molecules for each blade of grass by hand", then "life in six eras (days)" is fine.
Life IS pretty neat, so sometimes it is pretty comfy to think of a Deist force that guided life that doesn't "talk personally" to people. Most of where ultra-orthodox religion gets stuck is in superlatives of God as Perfect. Replace that with "Pretty Blessed Good" and all the arguments melt away. ("Gee, we're not sure what $Deity was thinking when ___ allowed Down's Syndrome to happen, but ___ is still Blessed Good so I'll worship ____ anyway."
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
Makes about as much sense as debating the literal truth of Grimm's fairy tales or Australian aboriginal tales or the Hopi creation myths.
I suspect there are more Christians alive today claiming to believe the literal truth of Genesis than there were Jews who believed it when Genesis was written down in the first place. Legends are just that: legends.
Personally, I prefer to believe that human beings are the offspring of the Son of God and a female bear (the Korean creation myth). It makes at least as much sense.
I piss off bigots.
My brother-in-law works at Bonhams and Butterfields, and was involved in building out the display, as he works in the department that deals with fossils and minerals. So you'd think I'd have seen some really awesome "In-Progress" photos. You'd be wrong. I guess I have to fly to Vega$ and get a look first-hand.
I like music
"Is our economy so bad..."
Uh, acquiring fossils has pretty much always been a private pursuit. Regardless of how the economy is right now, this is nothing new.
"Maybe it's time we energize a little more funding into the arts and history."
That wont solve the issue of where these are being found... mostly on private property. If they're under ground someone else owns, they get to do with it as they please, period. What could be done is to raise money, gather a crew, and then tell landowners "Hey, we think there might be dinosaur bones here... if we pay you X amount of dollars, can we dig them up and keep them?" If the owner agrees, then everyone is happy. And if he doesn't, then you look for your fossils elsewhere.
Life is hard, and the world is cruel
Someday when you've been banished to the most mundane drive in the USA (I-70 through western Kansas and eastern Colorado), make a stop in Hays, KS, and visit the Sternberg Museum of Natural History. They have an incredible collection of fossils (many from the same Kansas regions which produced the marine fossils being auctioned off from Gove, Logan counties) and some robotic big boys (like a reactionary T-Rex) to keep the kids happy. http://www.fhsu.edu/sternberg/ You can also check out the world famous "fish-in-a-fish" exhibit, very cool stuff. For an hour or two, you'll completely forget how hideous the rest of your 4 1/2 drive to KC or Denver is looking.