'Stan' the T. rex just sold for $31.8 million?and scientists are furious

rex dug up by the same South Dakota institute and eventually purchased by the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago for $8.36 million (equivalent to nearly $13.5 million today).The day after Stan was sold, paleontologist Lindsay Zanno of the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences described the sale price as “simply staggering.”“That’s an astronomical price that borders on absurdity, based on my knowledge of the market,” added paleontologist David Evans, the vertebrate paleontology chair at the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto, who suggested the anonymous buyer could have spent the same funds in a far more effective way to deepen humanity’s understanding of the prehistoric beasts. (Find out more about the U.S. fossil trade in National Geographic magazine.)“This is terrible for science and is a great boost and incentive for commercial outfits to exploit the dinosaur fossils of the American West,” says tyrannosaur expert Thomas Carr, a paleontologist at Carthage College in Kenosha, Wisconsin.Paleontologists fear that if the buyer turns out to be a private collector, researchers and the public could lose access to the fossil, limiting their ability to repeat results such as measurements of its bones or conduct new analyses with more advanced tools and techniques. In 2018, the French auctioneer Arguttes sold off a skeleton of the predatory dinosaur Allosaurus, drawing criticism from scientists because its sale, like Stan’s, risked creating the perception that dinosaurs were worth more in dollars than they were in discoveries.The 2,000-member Society of Vertebrate Paleontology (SVP), which represents paleontologists around the world, opposes fossil auctions and has long discouraged the study of privately held fossils, out of concern that researchers and the public wouldn’t always be guaranteed access to them. In its reply, Christie’s acknowledged the society’s stance but said that the sale couldn’t be restricted, according to University of Bristol paleontologist and outgoing SVP president Emily Rayfield, who co-signed the society’s letter.“The high-profile nature of the auction and the publicity surrounding the auction event were designed to appeal to high-end bidders, thereby elevating the price of fossil material and promoting fossils as luxury items,” Rayfield wrote in an email interview. rex specimen to a museum or research institution.“Do the right thing: totally relinquish your ownership of the fossil and donate it to an accredited natural history museum so that science can ethically be done on Stan for the benefit of everyone on the planet who has an interest in dinosaurs,” Carr urged.“You have the opportunity to share a treasure with the world,” Zanno added.