When the van arrived outside her gallery in Cambridge last summer, it took five men to get the head to the door, but no further. “I thought we were going to have to demolish something,” Nizzola says. “But well, where there’s a will, there’s a way.” Painfully slowly, with several heart-stopping moments, the new exhibit—nicknamed Tracey—was wiggled indoors.
The buzz attracted unexpected enthusiasts. Russell Crowe, Leonardo DiCaprio and Nicolas Cage acquired dinosaur fossils. Opportunist suppliers rushed to source specimens from all over the world, some with more regard than others for procedural niceties. A few people got their fingers burnt: Cage paid $276,000 for the skull of a Tarbosaurus bataar in 2007 but agreed eight years later to give it back, after it emerged that it had been exported illegally from Mongolia.
“The international art market has only recently woken up to this category,” Hyslop says—and sellers are increasingly targeting that market. The record-breaking sale of Stan, for example, was the culmination of a 20th Century Evening Sale at Christie’s, in which multimillion-dollar works by Cézanne, Van Gogh, Picasso, Rothko and Jackson Pollock were also auctioned; and when Sotheby’s sold a T. rex skull for $6.1 million in December, it was part of its New York Luxury Week.
This cocktail of tastes is more widely shared than you might expect. At Extraordinary Objects in Cambridge, for example, fossils like Tracey can be viewed alongside artworks by Banksy, Grayson Perry, Gilbert & George and the like.
But there is no disguising his belief that the wonders of natural history are there to be collected and marvelled at. “I was always fascinated by the idea of creating your own worlds, made of objects,” he says. This aesthetically led approach does not endear him to the significant number of palaeontologists who believe that, actually, dinosaur fossils are there to be studied.
Dan O’Dowd, a US tech billionaire who owns a T. rex called Samson, thinks the academic enemies of private collecting are “ridiculous”. He would be delighted for scientists to study Samson, “but they say, ‘No, we can’t look at it’.” And yet, O’Dowd points out, “That’s how these things get found. We don’t find them because, you know, PhDs are scrambling around in holes in South Dakota looking for bones. They’re almost all found by private collectors and fossil hunters who go out and find them.
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