When asked by WIRED about the origin of the bite-mark claim, Hatton replied, “The bite marks are very clear, and are not all straight punctures but lateral bites where you can clearly see the shape of the tooth. You can also tell from the edges of the hole whether the break is clean, or if the hole is gradual (which would be more likely the result of a parasitic or other infection that gradually and evenly eats the bone).” She did not indicate where this analysis came from.
But the central issue with auctioning fossils, researchers contend, is that when specimens end up in private hands, they become unavailable for scientific study. Even if a private collector loans a fossil out for display or study at a museum, as happened last year when the American Museum of Natural History in New York City secured a four-year loan of Griffin’s Stegosaurus, such an arrangement violates a central tenet of paleontology: Scientific reproducibility requires that researchers other than those conducting the original examination have access to those same fossils in perpetuity.
That approach allows paleontologists to validate findings, test new hypotheses, and build knowledge of the past. To ensure access, fossils must be held in public repositories on a permanent basis. So vital is this covenant that established scientific journals won’t publish a study on a specimen that isn’t in the custody of a publicly accessible museum, Sumida explains.
Everything scientists have been able to piece together from fossils about prehistory—from the origin of multicellular life to the dawn of humankind—rests on this system.
“A scientifically important fossil isn’t just a static object; it’s a permanent source of data that future generations of scientists will study with tools that haven’t even been invented yet—but only if the fossil remains in the public trust,” says Kristi Curry Rogers, a paleontologist at Macalester College. “Think about all the cool discoveries that have been made in the last 50 years about dinosaur diets, body temperatures, coloration, reproduction, vocalization, neurobiology—none of these discoveries would have been possible if the fossils had disappeared into private collections.”
