Tony_Balony
Joined: 12 Apr 2007
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 Posted: Tue Feb 19, 2008 9:41 am Post subject: Bang a Gong - 4 Sale T Rex Fossil |
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http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&Item=200200058863&Category=15915&_trksid=p3907.m29
20% complete. A real value at $450,000 with clear title. This one is famous somehow.
Happy bidding!
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T. Rex Bones, Uncovered With a Pick, Will Be Sold With a Hammer
By NICK MADIGAN
Published: May 15, 2004
LOS ANGELES, May 14 - When Japheth Boyce was a tyke in South Dakota, he liked to scrabble around in the barren, rocky ground of the Badlands, hunting for fossils of saber-toothed tigers, rhinoceroses and three-toed horses the size of golden retrievers.
Now, years later, as a paleontologist with a penchant for cowboy hats and homespun philosophy, his favorite prey is Tyrannosaurus rex, the carnivorous dinosaur he calls ''the biggest and baddest boy on the block."
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On Sunday, hundreds of fossilized bones from a 68-million-year-old T. rex that Mr. Boyce and his team spent two years digging up in eastern Wyoming will be sold here in what is being billed as the largest auction of natural history items to date. The bones, which are about 20 percent of the skeleton of the animal, nicknamed Barnum, are expected to fetch at least $900,000.
It is only the second T. rex auction in history, said the auction house, Bonhams & Butterfields. In 1997, a dinosaur named Sue that had been found near Faith, S.D., with about 85 percent of its bones largely intact, including a 600-pound skull, went to the Field Museum in Chicago for $8.36 million.
Barnum is all the more intriguing, experts say, because the bones may be part of the first T. rex ever found, now housed at the Natural History Museum in London. After talking with museum officials, Mr. Boyce went to London a week ago to compare samples of the two.
"I'm saying that, as a statement of scientific fact, it's the same animal," Mr. Boyce said in an interview. The Barnum bones, he noted, were found in the same two-square-mile plot of land near Newcastle, Wyo., as the remains now in London, which were found in 1900 and acquired by the British museum in 1960. Moreover, he said, several of the fragments are complementary in terms of size, fit and texture.
Two British museum officials did not return calls seeking comment.
Mr. Boyce, who arrived at the museum in London last week in what he calls "high rodeo drag" - Stetson, cowboy boots and a beaded vest woven by a Lakota Sioux woman - said he believed the British officials were simply awaiting the outcome of a peer review to determine whether there is a connection.
The skeleton in London is 13.8 percent complete. If it were combined with the newer discovery, it would be one of the most complete T-Rex skeletons in the world.
"The importance lies in the fact that they could potentially be reunited," said Tom Lindgren, director of paleontology at Bonhams & Butterfields. "This was the first T-Rex ever found - they just didn't complete the task."
That is, until Japheth Boyce came along.
"My dad took me on the Badlands when I was 2 and screwed up the rest of my life," Mr. Boyce, 47, said at the auction house on Sunset Boulevard, where he cut an incongruous figure amidst the stylish Angelenos peering at the bones and at a towering, 40-foot-long cast of another Tyrannosaurus rex, named Stan. When a Wyoming rancher called him in 1995 and said he thought there was a dinosaur on his land, Mr. Boyce said he was not initially excited. When he got to the spot, a mosquito-riddled marshy area, Mr. Boyce found a piece of a lower jaw and a neck vertebrae and, later, dozens of other pieces. He knew they came from a T. rex, he said.
The satisfaction of unearthing the remains was dampened for Mr. Boyce and his team by a dispute over ownership of the bones. A similar clash had roiled the disposition of Sue.
"There were several years of federal litigation," said Joe Reece, a lawyer in Denver who represented a group of investors who had sought to buy the Barnum bones from Mr. Boyce and his business partners. "This has generated many, many boxes of documents in three states."
One of the investors, Jeff Miller, an art and antiques dealer in Denver, said he and his partners had been assured that there was clear title to the remains. Instead, among other problems, they became an issue in the divorce of one of Mr. Boyce's partners, whose wife claimed the bones in the disposition of their assets.
Eventually, a court ordered Barnum be sold at auction and the proceeds distributed among the various parties.
"This was meant to be the ultimate antique," Mr. Miller said, referring to his plans to buy and later sell the dinosaur.
Mr. Boyce, who said he initially resisted the plan to sell Barnum, said he could not address the subject of the various lawsuits.
Mr. Lindgren, the auction house paleontologist, stood by him. "Many people would have just picked up souvenir bones," he said. "A lot of people wouldn't have gone to the trouble that Japh did." |
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