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Gorgosaurus—or “fierce lizard”—didn’t have to worry about being hunted 77 million years ago when it terrorized the Earth. Cousin of T-Rex, the dinosaur could stretch up to 30 feet and weigh up to three tons. Armed with a mouth full of double serrated teeth, it had no trouble stabbing and slicing through the flesh of its prey.
But after a mass extinction and several ice ages later, a new threat emerged this week – the buck – to capture one of the 20 known skeletons of the apex predator, which, like its more famous cousin, stood on two legs and had a pair of small arms.
On Thursday, a wealthy collector spent $6.1 million to buy the only known Gorgosaurus skeleton available for private ownership, according to Sotheby’s, the auction house that brokered the deal. The sale reignited a long-simmering feud in the paleontological community, which has for years condemned the growing commercialization of the field, including the sale of fossils to private buyers.
Gregory Erickson, a professor of palaeobiology at Florida State University, told the BBC he feared a multimillion-dollar sale like Thursday’s “sends a message that this is just any other commodity that money can buy, not scientific utility’.
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Gorgosaurus lived in the late Cretaceous period, predating T. rex by about 10 million years, Sotheby’s said in its listing of the skeleton. Although smaller, it was “much faster and more ferocious” than T. rex, which scientists believe was more of a scavenger because its teeth were better suited for crushing bone.
The one that was sold Thursday died about 77 million years ago in the Judith River area of what is now Chouteau County, Mont. It remained there until it was unearthed in 2018 on private property, Sotheby’s said. If it had been found on federal land or north of the Canadian border, the skeleton would have been in the public domain, available for scientific study and public viewing, the New York Times reported.
“I am absolutely disgusted, disturbed and disappointed because of the massive damage that the loss of these specimens will do to science,” Thomas Carr, a vertebrate paleontologist at Carthage College who studies tyrannosauroids like Gorgosaurus, told the Times. “It’s a disaster.”
It’s a debate that has raged for decades. Sotheby’s first auctioned a fossilized dinosaur skeleton in 1997, when it sold a T. rex nicknamed Sue to the Chicago-based Field Museum for about $8.4 million. The fossil got its nickname from Sue Hendrickson, the backhoe dealer who discovered it in 1990 in South Dakota.
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In 1998, John Hoganson, paleontologist emeritus of the North Dakota Geological Survey, predicted a tension that would only grow over the next 24 years between scientists like himself who wanted to keep fossils in the public domain for scientific study and those involved in “ a booming international market for fossils and the resulting collection and sale of fossils by profiteers,” according to CNN.
More than a decade later, the business of private exploration is booming, according to a 2009 Smithsonian magazine article titled “The Fossil Dinosaur Wars.” Spurred on by finds like Sue’s, amateur prospectors flooded the American West and the Great Plains in what they increasingly saw as a modern-day gold rush. Their desire to profit from everything from a 5-inch shark tooth to a once-in-a-lifetime result like a complete dinosaur skeleton put them at odds with scientists and the federal government.
“In terms of digging up fossils, there are a lot more people” than there used to be, Matthew Carano, curator of dinosaurs at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History, told Smithsonian magazine. “Twenty years ago, if you came across a private or commercial prospector in the field, it was one person or a few people. Now you go to good fossil sites in, say, Wyoming, and you find quarries with maybe 20 people working and doing professional work digging for fossils.
Five years later, the researchers warned that tensions had grown and would continue to do so, posing “the greatest challenge for paleontology of the 21st century.” In a 2014 report, researchers said the new discoveries have ushered in a new “Golden Age” in the field, which paleontologists can use to inspire people about their work and science in general. But the researchers cautioned that these scientists need to do a better job of communicating the fossils’ value to the general public.
According to a 2014 article in Palaeontologia Electronica, the notion that “it’s okay to buy and sell fossils” has become “deeply entrenched.”
“Most of the general population is unaware that fossil commercialization is even a problem,” the researchers wrote.
Erickson, the palaeobiology professor, told the BBC that the public’s fascination would continue. The multi-million dollar sales are the result of a society obsessed with “dynomania,” fueled at least in part by cultural touchstones like the Jurassic Park franchise.
But, Erickson added, it goes deeper than that. Dinosaurs – T. rex, stegosaurus, brontosaurus, pterodactyl – are some of the first creatures to inspire awe and excitement in children. The frenzy surrounding their fossils and even the chance to own one is a way to touch this wonder again.
“Ever since childhood, people have been in love with dinosaurs,” Erickson told the BBC, “so I understand why people buy dinosaur fossils.”
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