[meteorite-list] Chait Natural History Auction Recap

From: Jason Utas <meteoritekid_at_meteoritecentral.com>
Date: Tue, 27 Mar 2007 01:13:32 -0700
Message-ID: <93aaac890703270113m37b778cbl163417530ad3da84_at_mail.gmail.com>

-With quotes from meteorite dealers Anders Karlsson and Darryl Pitt.
...It's not every day meteorite enthusiasts get onto 'AOL's top news...'

http://news.aol.com/topnews/articles/_a/and-to-the-winner-goes-the-dinosaur/20070326094009990001?ncid=NWS00010000000001

Updated:2007-03-26 15:55:30
And to the Winner Goes the Dinosaur Skull
By ROJA HEYDARPOUR
The New York Times
(March 26) -- The dinosaur skull was advertised as "perfect for a New
York City apartment," though with a starting bid of $100,000, it was
clear that the apartment in question was not, say, a studio in a
walk-up.


Some scientists worry that the high prices artifacts fetch at auction
lead to frenzied excavations and the loss of scientific information.


What the I. M. Chait Gallery billed as its "natural history" auction
-- held yesterday at a rented showroom on Fifth Avenue at 29th Street,
as well as by telephone and on eBay -- was a child's dream, a wealthy
person's playground and a curator's nightmare.

The showroom resembled miniature versions of the rooms at the American
Museum of Natural History. Fossils were displayed all around, and
meteorites lined the shelves. Nearly all 345 items up for bid were
available to touch.

They included an Egyptian mummy's hand; lion, hyena and warthog
skulls; a gold nugget weighing 62 troy ounces; and (behind glass, but
touchable on request) crystals, minerals and a meteorite from Mars.

The prize skull, from a Tyrannosaurus bataar, a close relative of the
T. rex, sat in the center of the room, with no barriers around it. It
went for a bid of $276,000 phoned in by a private collector on the
West Coast whom the gallery would not identify.

The skull, estimated to be about 67 million years old, is 32 inches
long and 65 percent complete, with the rest of it, including the lower
right jaw and the back of the skull, having been restored with casts,
said David Herskowitz, the director of the gallery's natural history
department.

He obtained the specimen last summer, he said, after a collector in
Florida contacted him and said that he had acquired it from a Japanese
collector who had been storing the skull -- which was still embedded
in rock, or the matrix -- in a box since the early 1960s.

Paleontologists around the country have watched in pain in recent
years as fossils, skeleton parts and other prized artifacts have gone
on the block. In December, Christie's auctioned an Egyptian wooden
sarcophagus with a male mummy inside to a private American collector
for $1.1 million. In 1997, the Field Museum in Chicago paid $8.36
million at auction for a Tyrannosaurus rex, which had been named Sue,
that had about 85 percent of its bones largely intact.


Some scientists worry that such prices lead to frenzied excavations
and, as a result, the loss of valuable scientific information. Kevin
Padian, a paleontologist at University of California, Berkeley, said
that private collectors recover the fossils but miss pieces of the
puzzle that paleontologists cherish, like the circumstances of the
environment, the way the fossil was entombed, and remnants of any soft
tissue in vertebrate fossils. "We're losing science, we're losing
education, we're losing valuable specimens," he said.

But private collectors argue that without the profit incentive,
interesting specimens would continue to decay in the earth as seasons
change, perhaps never to be exhumed.

"If the American commercial paleontologist isn't looking for this
stuff, it won't be found," said Darryl Pitt, 51, of New York, the
owner of one of the world's largest meteorite collections. "It has
sent Bedouins and Berbers searching the desert."

For more than a century, mummies and other artifacts have been taken
out of Egypt, sometimes with its government's permission, sometimes
without. In recent years, Egypt has pressed foreign museums to return
some important items.

The Egyptian mummy's hand was expected to go to the Ripley's Believe
It or Not! organization, but it lost to Anders Karlsson, a gallery
owner in Santa Monica, Calif. Mr. Karlsson, who paid $4,500, said that
he would not put the hand up for sale, that it was going to become a
family heirloom.

"Hopefully," he said, "it doesn't have any bad seeds attached to it."

It was the only item in the auction not available on eBay because the
Web site has limitations on the sale of body parts.

The hand was traced to an antique dealer in New Jersey who got it from
the British Museum. A New York collector then acquired it in the
1960s, said Mr. Herskowitz, the Chait gallery's natural history
director. He said it was acquired before Egypt enacted a law
prohibiting the export of its cultural heritage.

The most expensive item sold yesterday was the dinosaur skull. Its new
owner also won a rare giant wolf skull from the Rancho La Brea
Formation for $50,000.

It was not known what kind of house, apartment or gallery the skull
would be going to, though Mr. Herskowitz hinted that the buyer has
been known to show his collection to the public.

"Someday," he said, "you might see it."


Copyright (c) 2007 The New York Times Company
2007-03-26 09:40:42
Received on Tue 27 Mar 2007 04:13:32 AM PDT