Tyrannosaur skeleton prepped for auction

(Livescience.com) NEW YORK - a showroom on the west side of Manhattan, minerals worth hundreds of thousands of dollars, tufts of mammoth hair, pieces of the moon, not to mention a nearly complete Tyrannosaur skeleton, are being unpacked and arranged.

On Sunday (May 20), Heritage Auctions plans to auction these items off, but for the three days before, they are on public display here.

The headliner is a nearly complete Tyrannosaurus bataar, fully prepared and mounted. This animal, whose remains measure 8 feet (2.4 meters) tall and 24 feet (7.3 meters) long, was an Asian relative to the infamous North American Tyrannosaurus rex. The few pieces missing have been replaced with casts. [Up For Auction: A Natural History Gallery]

"The coolest thing about dinosaurs are the claws and the teeth," said David Herskowitz, director of Natural History at Heritage Auctions. "Here you have like 80 percent of the claws are real, and 75 percent of the teeth are real."

The starting bid is set at $850,000, but Herskowitz estimates the value of this dinosaur at $1.4 million to $1.8 million. The sale was announced about four months ago, which isn't much time to raise money, he said, but added that the specimen is a good investment.

"Rarely [are] there more than two or three dinosaurs on the market at any given time because it takes two years and a couple $100,000 to prep and mount these things. ... even just a 50 percent specimen," he said.

The last nearly complete tyrannosaurus to go up for auction, a T. rex named Sue after the fossil hunter who found it, fetched $8.36 million in 1997 and now resides in Chicago's Field Museum. The museum bought Sue with help from Disney, McDonald's and private donors, according to the museum's website.

"Museums especially in this country really don't have the money to spend on specimens, so they rely on philanthropists," Herskowitz said. "So we are hoping that a philanthropist or a museum trustee would be able to put up the money and purchase this, and then donate it to a museum." He added that there are also "a lot of private collectors that would buy such a specimen. If you think about it, every major natural history museum in America was originally a private collection."

Other dinosaur fossils include a duck-billed dinosaur skull and a strange-looking ankylosaurid skull. A table made with a slab of stone containing a fossil fish, a cast of one of the few existing dodo skeletons and an elephant-bird egg are among the many other relics of living things being sold.

The proverbial tyrannosaurus of the minerals is a nugget of gold in quartz weighing more than 70 ounces (2 kilograms), discovered in 1989 in Arizona by a man who dubbed it "Fred."

The meteorites include a small dark chuck of rock that originated on Mars and pieces of the moon.

Everything going up for auction on Sunday (May 20) is on display, except for the taxidermy.

The public can view these items at Center 548 (548 W. 22nd Street, between 10th Ave. and West Street, 4th floor) in New York City from Thursday through Saturday, 10 a.m. to 6 p.m.

You can follow LiveScience senior writer Wynne Parry on Twitter @Wynne_Parry. Follow LiveScience for the latest in science news and discoveries on Twitter @livescience and on Facebook.

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AnnPhD says:

The following is a plea from the President of Mongolia

THE OFFICE OF THE PRESIDENT OF MONGOLIA, PUBLIC RELATIONS & COMMUNICATIONS DIVISION
www.president.mn
2012-05-18

PRESIDENT OF MONGOLIA IS CONCERNED THAT T-REX SKELETON MAY BELONG TO MONGOLIA

President Elbegdorj Tsakhia talked to Minister of Education and Science, Mr.Otgonbayar calling his immediate attention to a dinosaur issue.
International science news on rare Tyrannosaurus Bataar skeleton to be auctioned on Sunday in NYC raised this alarm in Mongolia because the Heritage Auction website did not name the country where the T-Rex was found. The President of Mongolia, Elbegdorj Tsakhia, instructed Minister Otgonbayar to find all the information on the origin and route of the T-Rex fossil and to send an urgent appeal to the Heritage Auction for disclosure of this information before the Sunday auction.
If the T-Rex "uncovered in the Gobi Desert" originated in Mongolia, President Elbegdorj Tsakhia, said that it was illegal to auction the T-Rex and the fossil must be returned to Mongolia.
President Elbegdorj also called the international science community to help identify the origin of the T-rex and to alert the Mongolian government of any illegal international trade of Mongolian fossils.

The following open letter from Mark Norell of the American Museum of Natural History is self-explanatory and expands on the President's concern. The sale that you wrote about at Heritage Auction House is clearly illegal.
Dear Sirs-

It is with great concern that I see Mongolian dinosaur materials listed in the
upcoming (May 20) Heritage Auctions Natural History catalogue. For the last 22 years I
have excavated specimens Mongolia in conjunction with the Mongolian Academy of
Sciences. I have been an author on over 75 scientific papers describing these important
specimens. Unfortunately, in my years in the desert I have witnessed ever increasing
illegal looting of dinosaur sites, including some of my own excavations. These extremely
important fossils are now appearing on the international market.

In the current catalogue Lot 49317 (a skull of Saichania) and Lot 49315 (a
mounted Tarbosaurus skeleton) clearly were excavated in Mongolia as this is the only
locality in the world where these dinosaurs are known. The copy listed in the catalogue,
while not mentioning Mongolia specifically (the locality is listed as Central Asia)
repeatedly makes reference to the Gobi Desert and to the fact that other specimens of
dinosaurs were collected in Mongolia. As someone who is intimately familiar with these
faunas, these specimens were undoubtedly looted from Mongolia. There is no legal
mechanism (nor has there been for over 50 years) to remove vertebrate fossil material
from Mongolia. These specimens are the patrimony of the Mongolian people and should
be in a museum in Mongolia. As a professional paleontologist, am appalled that these
illegally collected specimens (with no associated documents regarding provenance) are
being are being sold at auction.

Sincerely,

Dr. Mark A. Norell
Chairman and Curator
Division of Paleontology
norell@amnh.org