Precious Bones

Asia's fossil business is booming despite the ubiquity of fraud. Is there a protocol for this lucrative trade? And who should own these natural treasures? 

- Zabrina Lo

All eyes were on what was billed as the first Tyrannosaurus rex (T. rex) skeleton to be sold in Asia at Christie's Hong Kong autumn auction last November. Described Las "well-preserved and quite solid", the 66-million-year-old specimen, named Shen, which means "godlike" in Mandarin, was estimated to fetch between US$15 million and US$25 million. The auction house was set to mount the colossal skeleton-measuring 12.2 metres long, 4.6 metres high and 2.1 metres wide, and weighing 1,400kg-at the Hong Kong Convention and Exhibition Centre, alongside fine art paintings, for public viewing.

Only the world's excitement was snuffed out in one fell swoop. Ten days before the scheduled sale on November 30, Christie's withdrew the skeleton. Peter Larson, the founder of the Black Hills Institute of Geological Research, which specialises in the excavation and preparation of fossils, was quoted by The New York Times as saying that Shen's owner is "using Stan to sell a dinosaur that's not Stan. It's very misleading".

Stan is a T. rex skeleton that was auctioned off by Christie's in New York in 2020 and is expected to be the centrepiece of the under-construction Natural History Museum Abu Dhabi. Larson's company retains intellectual property rights to Stan. It turned out that Shen's owner had bought a cast of Stan to supplement roughly three-quarters of the original bones. Larson, who examined Stan for three decades after excavating it in 1992, spotted from photos that Shen's skull had similar holes in the lower left jaw as Stan, thus starting rounds of re-examinations and debates that finally led to the withdrawal of the lot.

"Christie's did the right thing," Larson maintains in the New York Times interview. Shen was instead loaned to a museum for public display; in December 2022, at the time of writing, the beneficiary was still confidential.