For sale: two dinosaurs – ideal ‘trendy house decorations’?
Paris auction house tips carnivorous allosaurus to sell for up to US$800,000 – more than herbivorous diplodocus, valued at US$615,000, as ‘people like teeth’
The skeletons of an allosaurus and a diplodocus are up for auction today in Paris, France – marketed as hip interior design objects for those with big enough living rooms.
“The fossil market is no longer just for scientists,” says Iacopo Briano, of Binoche et Giquello, the auction house that is putting the two dinosaurs under the hammer.
“Dinosaurs have become cool, trendy -– real objects of decoration, like paintings,” the Italian expert told Agence France-Presse, citing Hollywood actors Leonardo DiCaprio and Nicolas Cage as fans of such outsized prehistoric ornaments.
Cage, however, did hand back the rare skull of a Tyrannosaurus bataar, a close cousin of Tyrannosaurus rex, which he bought in 2007 after it was found to have been stolen and illegally taken out of Mongolia.
Dinosaur bones are increasingly gracing collectors’ cabinets, with another huge skeleton, that of a theropod, expected to fetch up to €1.5 million (US$1.84 million) when it goes up for auction in June.
Chinese buyers
“For the last two or three years the Chinese have become interested in palaeontology and have been looking for big specimens of dinosaurs found on their soil, for their museums or even for individuals,” Briano says.
The new buyers are now bidding against multinational corporations as well as ultra-rich Europeans and Americans, the “traditional” buyers of dinosaur skeletons, Briano adds.
In 1997, McDonald’s and Walt Disney were among donors stumping up US$8.36 million to buy Sue – the most complete and best preserved Tyrannosaurus rex ever found – for the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago.