Inside the Booming Market for Dinosaur Fossils
5/2/202649 min
Two years ago, Citadel's Ken Griffin paid almost $45 million for a stegosaurus skeleton, making it the most expensive fossil ever sold at auction. So why are dinosaur bones joining the collections of millionaires instead of museums? How does the private market for fossils actually work? And how similar is it to the market for art and other antiquities? In this episode, we speak with Salomon Aaron, a director at London-based gallery David Aaron, where he is the gallery's in-house broker for dinosaur fossils. We talk about how fossils are found and priced, what it's like to work alongside dinosaur hunters, how his gallery identifies potential buyers, and why Joe thinks something about the birds-to-dinosaurs evolutionary pipeline is off.
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First 90 secondsSpeaker 00:00
[intro jingle] Bloomberg Audio Studios. Podcasts. Radio. News.
Tracy Alloway· Host0:07
[upbeat music] Hello, and welcome to another episode of the "Odd Lots" podcast. I'm Tracy Alloway.
Joe Weisenthal· Host0:21
And I'm Joe Weisenthal.
Tracy Alloway· Host0:23
Joe.
Joe Weisenthal· Host0:24
Yes.
Tracy Alloway· Host0:24
When you were a kid, or do your children now, are they into dinosaurs? Did you go through a dinosaur phase?
Joe Weisenthal· Host0:30
Yeah, yeah, 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 I l- [chuckles] Wait, does this come up a lot in conversation? Yeah, yeah, because I'm a troll to them. So I'll be like, "What's your favorite-" Oh, no, Joe. So I'll be... No, but I'll say things like, "What's your favorite dinosaur? Mine's the pterodactyl." [chuckles] And then my daughter rolls her eyes like, "Dad, pterodactyl is not technically a dinosaur."
Tracy Alloway· Host0:55
Wait, is that true?
Joe Weisenthal· Host0:56
It's apparently- I did not know that. Yeah, yeah.
Tracy Alloway· Host0:58
Wait, explain.
Joe Weisenthal· Host0:59
Um, uh, it's something... I don't understand it. Uh, apparently it's like a, it just a d- It, it's not technically a dinosaur. It's a prehistoric animal of some different nature that is technically not a d- Look it up.
Tracy Alloway· Host1:09
All right. Well- Look it up ... learn something new every day.
Joe Weisenthal· Host1:12
I'm kind of... [chuckles] You know what? I'm, I'm gonna sound like a crank here. I'm not a flat Earther, but I'm, like, sort of... I'm skeptical of dinosaurs. Um, I'm sure they existed- [chuckles] Skeptical of dinosaurs ... and I know we have fossil records of them, but here's what I don't get, okay?
Tracy Alloway· Host1:26
Mm-hmm.
Joe Weisenthal· Host1:26
And I know this isn't technically the topic, but I'm just g- So it's like,