It's very competitive. If you want to buy a great dinosaur fossil today, you can't just, you know, go down a promenade of galleries and, you know, you can walk in and say, oh, I'd like to buy a T-Rex. Could you show me what's, you know, behind the curtain? That doesn't exist. I mean, if you want to buy an amazing dinosaur fossil, you know, you're looking at having to kind of pre-buy it, pre-acquire it prior to prepping. So what we do with clients, for example, is a client recently — I sold an amazing complete skeleton. It's either a Marsh resource or it's a completely unknown new species, to a private collector who wanted to have it go on public display. So it's being loaned to the Colchester Museum in the UK. And it's kind of something that this private collector wants to be studied, and he wants it to be kind of made available to science. And I don't know if his plan at some point will be to donate it or what his plans are. But he's a very kind of philanthropic person. But in that scenario, what we had to do was, I met the client years ago. We agreed on the strategy, which was to buy an amazing complete skeleton. And then I consistently sent the client kind of propositions of specimens as they were being discovered. And I said, listen, this has just been found. This is what's been found so far. This is how much the price is to the landowner. This is how much I envision it will cost to prep. We need to pre-buy this if you want the specimen, because by the time this is acquired and prepped and complete, I mean, we're competing against the kind of sovereign wealth fund or kind of petrodollar states. You know, the tech, you know, the kind of, you know, it's just much more difficult. Sotheby's, Christie's — we'll never be able to get a price and it might not be able to acquire it. So that's what people have to do to buy really great dinosaur fossils usually.
Hello, and welcome to another episode of the Odd Lots podcast. I'm Tracy Alloway and I'm Joe Weisenthal. Joe, when you were a kid, or do your children now — are they into dinosaurs? Did you go through a dinosaur phase?
Absolutely. I loved dinosaurs as a kid. My kids are, of course, into dinosaurs. They're really into not only dinosaurs, but telling me which prehistoric animals aren't dinosaurs. So it just has come up a lot in conversation.
Yeah, because I'm a troll too. So I'll be like, what's your favorite? No. No. But I'll say things like, what's your favorite dinosaur? Or mine's the pterodactyl. And then my daughter rolls her eyes like, dad, pterodactyl is not technically a dinosaur.
Wait, is that true? I did not know that.
It's something. I don't understand it.
Apparently it's just a — it's not technically a dinosaur. It's a prehistoric animal of some different nature that is technically not. Look it up.
All right, well, look it up. Learn something new every day. I'm kind of like — you know what? I'm going to sound like a crank here. I'm not a flat earther, but I'm like, sort of, I'm skeptical of dinosaurs. I'm sure they exist. I know we have fossil records of them, but here's what I don't get. Okay. And I know this isn't technically the topic, but I'm just — so it's like, okay, we had all these animals and they're really crazy looking, these big beasts, and they sort of look like dragons in some cases or lizards, gigantic. And then they all went extinct for some reason prior or something. And then evolution started again. We got a new set and the new animals don't look anything like the dinosaurs by.
And that's not true. Chickens look like little dinosaurs. Come on.
I am. No they don't. They don't, they don't, they don't, they don't. I've seen what I've seen, Jurassic Park. I've been to the museum. I love looking at the fossil record. I know what chickens look like.
No, chickens have a total reptilian vibe. You can see it.
I disagree. All right. Okay, so this podcast is going to be around a source, right? Like, there's nothing that looks like a Tyrannosaurus. There's nothing that looks like a Brontosaurus.
Strong disagree. A lot of birds look like T-Rexes.
Okay, well, this is the other thing. They all go — they were birds. They actually had feathers. That's certainly not how they're depicted. And like a lot of what when you were growing up, a lot of birds look like T-Rexes. What?
No they don't. Okay. This could be 60 minutes of show, and I arguing over what looks like a T-Rex. What?
It does. Come on. You need to look at more birds, Joe. That's your problem.
Okay. Rather than us keep going with this. We're going to talk about a market, an interesting market, a market that, unusually for nowadays, is actually going up and is at records, and that is the fossil market, the dinosaur fossil market.
Okay. Now this I'm very interested. I believe that now I have — yeah, I believe that fossils exist. Okay. I'm glad we established. I'm also like, you know, I actually was at a dinner once and I met someone who was a commercial fossil pursuer or hunter? Collector, whatever. Sounds like they're worth quite a bit of money. Are they? Yeah.
Yeah. So every once in a while — funny thing about it, every once in a while, you see these headlines, like, you know, a new set of fossils or a new set of bones sold for a record price. So the one that jumps out at me because it has a finance angle is Ken Griffin buying a Stegosaurus skeleton for, I think, something like $45 million a couple years back. I think that was the most expensive fossil ever sold. But anecdotally, some of the things I've been reading are saying that fossils are becoming more of a thing. You know, once you get to a certain level of wealth, I guess you get into art or you get into antiquities, or nowadays maybe you get into dinosaur bones. There's one of those really fancy South Beach hotels. They have a big, full — I forget which — a big dinosaur sort of thing in their lobby. And I think they even, like, gold plated or something. It looks absolutely like a real fossil, I think. So it's like ostentatiously Miami or something like that.
Yeah. Oh, wow. Okay. Anyway, so I'm very — yeah. If I had a lot of money and I was done collecting art and I was done collecting rare books, maybe I'd move on to dinosaurs. I should just say this. This podcast is not just of interest to people that have millions of dollars to spend on dinosaur fossils. It is also an interesting market structure question and sourcing scenario, I guess, because as you say, there are commercial dinosaur hunters out there, but there are also a lot of regulations around what you can and cannot sell. There are also a lot of, you know, ethical questions that come up. Should these be in museums or should they be gold plated in a Miami lobby somewhere? You know, what else is something interesting? I just looked on the terminal and right now, dinosaur futures — fossils are in backwardation.
No, I mean, I made that up. Dinosaur futures. There's certainly not a four-year curve. I made that up.
Oh, my gosh. I was actually really excited.
Very excited about that. Yeah.
That's just pure fabrication. We should request it. Okay. All right. Without further ado, I am pleased to say we do, in fact, have the perfect guest. We're going to be speaking with Salomon Aaron. He's a director at David Aaron, which is a London-based antiquities, Islamic art and dinosaur fossil gallery. So someone who actually buys and sells fossils for a living, so can't wait. So thank you so much for coming on Odd Lots.
My pleasure. It's lovely to be with you both and to have this conversation.
So maybe just to situate ourselves. Is the fossil market similar to the art market or the antiquities market? Is it different in some way? Like, give us some comparatives as we think through dinosaur fossils as an asset class.
The dinosaur fossil market is starting to resemble other areas of the art market. But it's still quite a distance from that point. The principal reason being that it's a very underdeveloped, recent, or recently growing, and attracting interest market. It doesn't have the depth of kind of research, market parallels, pricing comps, that the other areas of the art market does. And all of the rules relating to how you deal in dinosaur fossils are still being hammered out. Kind of — which we can delve into — kind of condition, authenticity, attribution, provenance, all of these things are still developing. And so it's true that the market has been booming over the past ten years. But I think that's changing in a way. As the market slightly matures, hopefully there's going to be a kind of a flight to quality and much more differentiation between kind of the great dinosaur fossils that deserve, and are finally getting that, you know, the recognition, and others, which shouldn't be. So I don't know if that in many ways kind of answers your question.
Yeah. That's a great place to start. So when we think about the broad universe of — let's just start with the universe of fossils rather than collected fossils — do we have a sense of like how many are in museums, private collections, etc., and how much is still in the ground yet to be found?
