When it comes to finding interesting and beautiful objects to adorn the homes of the well-to-do, David Herskowitz thinks he has stumbled upon something that makes a Jasper Johns painting or a Louis XIV table look bland.
“A while back I sold a triceratops skull to a Texas collector that was 8 feet by 7 feet, 95 percent complete and just beautiful, in an auction,” Herskowitz said. “It was cheap, just $75,000.”
On Sunday in Chicago, Herskowitz will oversee an auction of hundreds of old bones, meteorites, Stone Age tools, gemstones and stuffed exotic animals. The sale, which will also allow prospective buyers to place bids via the Internet, will be the first of its kind in the Midwest. Over the last decade, Herskowitz has organized about a dozen similar auctions in the U.S. and England.
He is probably the world’s leading promoter of a growing marketplace for the sale of natural history artifacts to private citizens.
Turning such items into collectible commodities no different than Beanie Babies, Hummel figurines or baseball cards is a trend that has made many academics and museum officials nervous.
“There are deep concerns about that,” said John Flynn, president of the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology and chairman of the Field Museum’s geology department.
In 1997, Flynn helped put together a consortium of donors who backed the Field’s winning $8.3 million bid in the public auction of Sue, the most complete fossil ever found of a Tyrannosaurus rex.
“Nobody was happy that kind of price had to be paid to assure that Sue would end up in a public institution,” Flynn said. “We had the winning bid, but there were other, private buyers who were bidding millions too. If one of them had won, we might have lost this fossil. It might never have been available for science and education.
“There are broad categories of fossils, such as many invertebrates and plants, that are common and numerous enough that it is OK to sell them to private individuals as a way of increasing public appreciation for these things. But the rarity of vertebrates in general makes it worthwhile to try to preserve them only in public institutions.”
Nonetheless, there is no law against buying and owning rare fossils and artifacts that have been acquired through legal channels. Herskowitz has staged all his auctions through major auction houses that carefully vet the material for authenticity.
“I also sold a gorgeous, almost-complete skull of an allosaurus for just $50,000,” Herskowitz said. “Somebody very famous in the entertainment industry bought that one. It was probably the sexiest natural history object I’ve ever sold.”
Trading in museum-style natural history objects in the last few years has become a burgeoning market, perhaps partly because of the spectacular price paid for Sue but also because dealers have learned that they can make a tidy profit.
For example, only days ago owners of a 40-foot-long Tyrannosaurus rex skeleton found in South Dakota in 1992 began a search for a buyer for the fossil through a three-week Internet auction in which bidding opened at $5.8 million.
Herskowitz’s auction Sunday will be held at a branch of the California-based auction house Butterfields at 441 W. Huron St. But bidders here will also compete against bidders at a Butterfields gallery in Los Angeles, where the session will be piped in via closed-circuit television, as well as potential buyers logged in to the Internet auction site eBay, which owns Butterfields.
The clientele for such items tend to be well-heeled people already attracted to fine art and decorative arts, Herskowitz said.
“Collectors like diversity,” Herskowitz said, “things that look good and are good conversation pieces. Why not a meteorite from outside the solar system with actual star dust in it, or a chunk of metal from Mars? Why not a beautiful, serrated tooth from a Tyrannosaurus rex?”
When Herskowitz first started trading in meteorite material a few years ago, iron meteorites sold at $30 to $40 a pound. Now, he said, they go for $200 a pound. “Just one gram from a piece of Mars rock five years ago sold for $50 or $60; now it sells for $2,000 a gram.”
While the Chicago sale has nothing quite so large as a Tyrannosaurus rex skeleton, it features stunning artifacts, including a complete skeleton of a pterosaur, a flying dinosaur, found 20 years ago in Germany. Herskowitz believes that will sell for $70,000 to $100,000.
He is also selling an assortment of dinosaur teeth, claws, vertebrae and eggs; woolly mammoth tusks; clumps of woolly mammoth hair; fossilized remains of fish, fowl and reptiles; and gemstones and amber pieces, some with insects embedded in them. Meteorite collectors will also be bidding on dozens of chunks of outer space metal, including a rare “oriented iron” meteorite that is expected to fetch $90,000 to $110,000.
San Francisco-based Herskowitz is conducting the auction in Chicago because he is selling off 100 stuffed animals from the recently bankrupted Fillmore Museum of Natural History, a city-owned institution in Fillmore, Calif. They represent wildlife from all over the world, including full and partial taxidermy mounts of grizzly bears, rams, bushbuck, warthogs, caribous, wildebeests and elephants.
“It is illegal to buy and sell certain animal mounts, like bears, in California, but not in Illinois, so we are holding the sale here,” he said.
Herskowitz said he employs a number of scientists and experts to make sure he is breaking no laws in selling such exotic artifacts. Most countries, for example, will not allow dinosaur fossils found within their borders to be sold or owned privately, considering them national treasures.
U.S. laws, however, are not as strict. There are laws against removing such fossils from federal lands, but there are no laws against selling fossils found on private property.
The 40-foot-long T. rex currently up for sale on the Internet, for example, was found on a private cattle ranch. The fossil is owned by two commercial fossil hunters, whose publicists have predicted it might bring in $10 to $12 million. No solid bids so far have been announced by the two on-line auctioneers, Millionaire.com and Lycos Inc., who are handling the sale.
“The courts have upheld the private ownership of the fossil,” said Brian Payas, a spokesman for Lycos. “I could see a buyer being a person who is interested in dinosaurs and who wanted to make it available to a museum. It would be a nice thing to donate to the Smithsonian, which doesn’t have a T. rex, and have their name on it.”
Vertebrate paleontologists are not as optimistic about the good intentions of fossil buyers and would like to see laws banning all sales of and trade in “significant” vertebrate fossils except for museums or universities.
“Something hidden away on somebody’s mantelpiece or office isn’t going to benefit mankind,” Flynn said, “and it probably isn’t going to be conserved very well either.
“Selling these artifacts is something our (paleontological) society is against in principle. It’s the commodification of a tangible piece of history of life on our planet.”
