Photographers Gabriele Galimberti and Juri
de Luca are based in Italy. Richard Conniff is
the author of House of Lost Worlds: Dinosaurs,
Dynasties, and the Story of Life on Earth.stems partly from necessity. Cash-strapped
museums everywhere have cut research staff
and budgets. Commercial collectors are thus
“digging much more than scientists,” says Kirk
Johnson, director of the Smithsonian National
Museum of Natural History. “We go for three
weeks’ vacation. They dig for five months.”
The specimens that commercial dealers dis-
cover and sell to private collectors would not
otherwise “automatically have gone to muse-
ums,” adds American Museum of Natural History
paleontologist Mark Norell. More likely, they
would have eroded out of remote hillsides unno-
ticed and weathered to nothing over time.
The cowboy-and-farmer excavations that
“destroyed a lot of really important stuff ” in
the late 1980s and 1990s are less common now,
Norell says. In the American West, commercial
collectors often do better work than academic
paleontologists, he says, if only because “the
quality of the excavation adds so much to the
value of the specimen.”
That’s not the case in China, where untrained
amateurs still do most of the digging. But com-
mercial collectors in both countries have found
what Johnson calls “some really exquisite stuff ”
during the past quarter century.
Such discoveries almost inevitably oblige col-
lectors and paleontologists to work together. A
few years ago when Norell was helping prepare
a pterosaur exhibit, he included a celebrated
specimen called Dark Wing, on loan from the
German retiree who prepared the flying reptile’s
fossil and had kept it hanging over his mantel.
When a spectacular fossil of a birdlike dinosaur
called Archaeopteryx appeared, a private collec-
tor acquired it for the Wyoming Dinosaur Center,
a museum he created in Thermopolis, Wyoming.
Other private specimens ultimately wind up
in museums on permanent loan or as gifts—
assuming the buyers have preserved critical
scientific documentation. The donors may not
be the private collectors who bought dinosaurs
to make friends say, Wow! But sooner or later, the
tantalizing vision of a tax-deductible donation
will glimmer in the eyes of their heirs as they
realize, says one museum exhibit designer, that
dinosaurs are “not really conducive to the home
environment” and are “not easy to dust.” jPRIVATE COLLECTORS AND
MUSEUM PALEONTOLOGISTS
DO COOPERATE SOMETIMES.
THAT’S PARTLY OUT OF
NECESSITY, AS CASH-
STRAPPED MUSEUMS HAVE
CUT STAFF AND BUDGETS.
THE DINOSAUR IN THE ROOM 141