The Economics of Everyday Things - 6. T. rex Skeletons

Episode Date: June 19, 2023

How do they emerge from the Upper Cretaceous period to end up in natural-history museums and private collections? Zachary Crockett digs for answers.

In October of 2020, there was a hotly anticipated auction at Christie's in New York City. It included paintings from some of history's most venerated artists. Picasso, Rothko, Cezanne. But the lot that fetched the highest price was not a painting. Lot number 59. Really? 27? Sorry, 27 and 1, please. was not a painting. Law number 59. Really? 27. It was really, sorry, 27.1, please.

We're all waiting with Bated Breath, 27,100,000 dollars. Printed 7.5, please. We've come this far. Okay, 27,500,000 dollars. Fair warning. I am happy to sell this and sold. Thank you very much. The object on the block, a Toronto

Soros Rex skeleton named Stan. With fees, it went for just under $32 million. More than five times its minimum estimated sale price. For the man who helped discover Stan, it was validation of a job well done. For Stan, it was validation of a job well done. Stan was 25,000 person hours. That's a lot of work. And you know, somebody has to pay for that. For the Freakonomics Radio Network, this is the economics of everyday things. I'm Zachary Kraken.

Today, T. Rex Skeletons. You've probably seen a T. Rex, or at least part of one at a natural history museum. So how did it get there? Piano music Well, if you want to find one in the ground, your best bet is to head to the Hell Creek Formation, a stretch of rock that runs through Montana, Wyoming, and the Dakotas.

It dates back to the Cretaceous Age, which ended around 66 million years ago. The first documented T-Rex discovery was made in the Hell Creek Form in 1902. And nearly all of the T-Rex excavated since then, that's around 140 of them, were also found there. A lot of that land is publicly owned. And here in the United States, fossils on public land are protected by law. You need permission from the Bureau of Land Management to conduct searches. In most cases, you also have to be a credentialed scientist. Someone like Thomas Carr, PhD, Director of the Carthage Institute of Paleontology, I study the growth and evolution of trans-saurus wrecks in its closest relatives. Carr is one of the country's foremost experts on tyrannosaurus rex. And he is not in it for the

money. The purpose of collecting fossils on public land is to collect them for science and education, but no point is contact made with the market. You know, it would just defeat the purpose entirely. When you find fossils on public land, you're not allowed to sell them. Once we're out of the ground, they have to go into a public trust. At the end of each year, we are responsible for submitting a field report, which includes a catalog of all the fossils that we found.

But a fossil found on private land? That's a different story. But it's really a free for all on private land. If a person finds a dinosaur, they can do whatever they want with it. That includes selling it on the open market. At annual gatherings like the Tucson German Mineral Show, you'll find dozens of fossil hunters, selling things like Spinosaurus teeth and bone fragments of triceratops. If you ask around, it won't be long before you come across this guy. My name is Peter Larson, I'm president of Black Hills Institute of Geological Research in

Hill City, South Dakota. The place where museums go to shop for such strange things is dinosaur skeletons. Larson started out in the 70s, selling small fossils at trade shows. One day, that all changed. We were approached by a museum that said, can you get us a dinosaur skeleton? And although I'd never found a dinosaur skeleton, I said, sure, of course we can.

He ended up finding that dinosaur, and then he found a hell of a lot more of them, specifically T-Rex skeletons. We've collected now, I think we're at number 13. That's quite a few. When Larson wants to go look for dinosaur bones, the first thing he has to do is get permission to conduct a search on private land. This involves cutting the ranch owner in

on any future discoveries. We come up with a value based upon market prices at the time. That can be anywhere from 10% of something that's hard to sell to as much as 50% if you've got a nice T-Rex skeleton on your ground. Fossil scouting isn't as romantic as it sounds. Larson walks around for months over craggy terrain, his eye trained to the ground for the faintest bone fragments. Many times he won't find anything at all.

When he does find evidence of a skeleton, he begins a lengthy and extremely intensive excavation process. From start to finish, getting a dinosaur fossil out of the ground and into a buyer's hands can take two to three years. So let's say it's a T-Rex skeleton, it's a 40 foot long skeleton, you can have an investment of in excess of a million dollars to get that ready for exhibit. Larson will strike a deal with a potential buyer before the fossil is removed.

So he has to approximate his overhead costs in advance. Sometimes you win and sometimes you lose. We've done projects where we've actually lost money on them just because we underestimated the amount of time it was going to take. When everything goes smoothly, he nets a profit of around 20% of the sale price of the skeleton.

Now, what a fossil commands on the market depends on a few factors. Its size, its condition, and most importantly, its completeness. There are around 380 bones in a T-Rex skeleton. No one has ever found a fully intact specimen. But Larsen came close. On a scorching summer day in 1990, just outside the city of Faith, South Dakota, Larsen and his team uncovered the most complete T.R.X. skeleton in history, 90% by Bonvolume. They named it Sue. Sue came with some drama. After the excavation, it came out that the fossil head actually

been found on land that was part of the Cheyenne River Indian Reservation. Federal agents seized it and illegal battle broke out. In the end, the landowner, a man named Morris Williams, who was a member of the Sioux tribe, was awarded full ownership. And he took the dinosaur straight to auction. Up to that point, no fossil had been sold for a million dollars. All of a sudden, you know, went to 2 million, to 3 million, to 4 million, to 5 million, to 7 million. Sue sold for around $8.4 million to the Field Museum in Chicago, with financing from corporate sponsors like McDonald's and the Walt Disney Company.

It was the start of a new age in the market for dinosaur fossils. Everybody said, huh, these fossils could be worth a lot of money. It brought a number of what I call dinosaur dreamers into the business. I'm Clayton Phypsen, some folks call me the dinosaur cowboy. Before I became a fossil hunter, I really was a cowboy. That's all I'd ever really done. Phyps grew up on a ranch in remote Montana. His family were homesteaders going back generations, scraping a living off the land. But around the time Sue was discovered, he realized he might be sitting on a gold mine.

The kid came by and asked if he could look for fossils and it was right after the movie Jurassic Park came out. The dinosaur craze was high and it just really picked my interest and I started spending every free minute I had learning what it could about dinosaurs. In 2003, he nabbed his first big find, the skull of a stiggy moloch, a rare horned dinosaur that roamed the North American planes

around 70 million years ago. I ended up selling that. It gave me about a year's wages as to what I was making as a cowboy to see if I could maybe quit my job and make fossil hunting more of a way to earn a living for my family. And I had to go out and find something or we didn't get to buy groceries.

A few years later, on a neighboring ranch, Fips stumbled across the discovery of a lifetime. The remains of a young T-Rex and a triceratops entangled in a deadly brawl. Which raised a question? How exactly does an amateur paleontologist get a 20 ton of fossil out of the ground? There were no YouTube videos out there on how to do it at that time, so we started out with some rancher ingenuity. Fips dug around the massive fossil, slipped to pallet underneath it, and dragged it down the road with a tractor trailer. While the excavation method was less than scientific, the fossil itself was one of a kind. But in the dinosaur market, even the best fossils can be hard to sell. And that's because finding a buyer can be almost as hard as finding a dinosaur.

That's coming up. is finding a dinosaur. That's coming up. With a rare dinosaur fossil in hand, Clayton Phipps thought he'd have an easy sell. We'd went to most of the major museums in the US and some overseas museums and tried to get somebody interested and it kept me broke for years. Phipps spent nearly two decades trying to sell his prize fossil.

In 2020, he finally secured a buyer. The North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences bought it for $6 million. After paying off the landowner and accounting for expenses, Fips says the deal didn't make him as rich as he'd hoped. If I had a dollar for every step I've ever taken looking for a dinosaur, or even probably a dime, I may be better off. Now I'm back to, yep, let's find another one. Peter Larson, our other fossil hunter, knows better than anyone that a big sale doesn't always result in a big payday.

Remember Stan, the dinosaur that fetched $31.8 million at Christie's? It ended up in Abu Dhabi, where it will be the star of a new museum in a few years. Larson didn't see a penny from that sale. In the years leading up to the auction, he had a dispute with his brother over the ownership of their company. They agreed on an unorthodox settlement. His brother got Stan's bones, he kept the firm.

But he did get to keep the intellectual property rights. His brother got Stan's bones, he kept the firm. But he did get to keep the intellectual property rights to Stan. No two people prepare a bone the same. And, you know, there's the artistry where you reconstruct, where you're putting the pieces back together, where you're creating the parts that are missing. It's all art. And so we have a registered copyright and we trademarked the name Stan. Larson's company now makes extremely accurate plastic casts

of Stan, right down to the serrations in the teeth. Those casts become his bread and butter. A Stan full-mounted cast sells for $120,000, and then that's plus whatever shipping and creating that wouldn't have to go with that. That's a bargain compared to, you know, 32 million. Yeah, that's right. Not everyone can afford a cast of stand, but a lot more people can then afford an original stand skeleton.

Larson says he has sold around 100 casts to museums all over the world. There are stands in Washington, D.C., Korea, Japan, India, France, Spain, Germany, England, stands all over the place. There are even a few stands floating around in private homes. Dwayne Therock Johnson has a plastic stand skull in his home office. It set him back around 12,000 bucks. And if you take a boat down Lake Washington in Seattle

and you peer into the glass atrium of one of those waterfront mansions, you might catch a glimpse of a full-scale stand skeleton. People will say, well, how much did your cast cost? Like they wanna see how much money I blew in that. And let's look. The truth of it is, if you build a living room, big enough to hold the dinosaur,

that cost you way more than the dinosaur. That's Nathan Murphold. He was the first CTO at Microsoft. He's the founder of a private equity firm called Intellectual Ventures. And as it happens, he's also very into dinosaurs. Oh, yeah, I've got, so Archaeopteryx is a very famous fossil. I have a Megalodon jaw.

I have an ancient fish called Zyfactinus, which is a fish that used to live in the inland sea. Outside of museums, there aren't many people willing to shell out big bucks for dinosaur fossils. But Mirfold is one of them. The Wall Street Journal did an article on people collecting fossils a number of years ago. And at that point in time, they had identified

three private individuals in the United States. And it was very funny because it was layen-artored at Caprio, Nicholas Cage, and me. But Mirfold isn't just a collector of fossils. He's accompanied paleontologists on digs. He's written a number of peer-reviewed papers, including one on dinosaur vomit. And he's played a critical role in funding scientific expeditions, which are chronically under-resourced. A huge amount of paleontology is people spending $20,000 a year to take a few of their students on a camping trip for a couple of weeks in one place.

One of the bigger line items, rentingending porta-potties for the campground. For the past two decades, Mirvold has granted around $500,000 per year to paleontologists. Those grants have resulted in at least 10 T-Rex discoveries, all on public land for academic research. It's an effort to level the playing field for scientists who simply can't compete with the budgets of commercial fossil hunters. Thomas Carr, the paleontology professor in Wisconsin, says that the commercial market

for dinosaurs has had a devastating impact on scientific research. He and many other paleontologists adhere to a code of ethics established by the Society of Verdebre paleontologists adhere to a code of ethics established by the Society of Verdabray Paleontology. That code says that they can only study fossils in the public trust. Anything sold on the open market is strictly off limits. And that's a problem, because to date, more than 60% of all known T.Rex fossils have been found by commercial fossil hunters.

It took only 33 years for the commercial folks to collect more of T. Rex's than public trust collected in 130 years. That's an existential threat. Our natural heritage is just being auctioned off for top dollar, and that's a problem for science because to really understand nature, particularly organisms, we have to have a high sample size. This problem is not exclusive to T-Rex fossils. Triceratops shows up on the market,

Duck Bill dinosaurs, in the past year, a very rare example of a bird-like dinosaur called dinonicus was auctioned to a private individual. And dinonicus is known from very few specimens like there's only six or seven good ones. It's gone and there's nothing we can do about it. Commercial fossil hunters like Larsen see it differently. The scientists should be happy that these other fossils are being saved because you cannot leave a fossil in the ground and expect it to survive.

I cannot fault someone for capitalizing an asset that they might have, and especially farmers and ranchers, they need to be paid for these things. they need to be paid for these things. Last summer, after many fruitless searches, paleontologist Thomas Carr finally found something that had been eluding him for years. Bone fragments from a rare juvenile T-Rex. They may not be worth $32 million, but the real value, he says, is what they can teach us about the inhabitants of the Cretaceous Era. He hopes to return next year to look for a full skeleton. That is, unless someone else gets there first.

For the economics of everyday things, I'm Zachary Crackett. things, I'm Zachary Crackett. This episode was produced by Sarah Lilly with help from Lyric Boutich and mixed by Jeremy Johnston. How many times do you get to meet the world's foremost expert on dinosaur vomit? I mean, right? It's truly an honor.