Auction offers dinosaur fossils

NEW YORK -- It's an event guaranteed to make everyone feel young -- an auction of fossils from dinosaurs and other creatures millions of years old.

The sale, "Dinosaurs and Other Prehistoric Creatures at Auction," consists of more than 300 lots. It takes place June 24 and is being assembled by Guernsey's auction house.

The collected items are an exploration of the evolution of life on planet Earth: the remains of trilobites, the horseshoe crab-looking creatures that died out 250 million years ago; fossils of dinosaurs and ammonites, life forms that haven't been around for at least 65 million years; tusks from mammoths that walked around as recently as 30,000 years ago.

"There are extraordinary things in this auction," said Arlan Ettinger, president of Guernsey's.

Henry Galiano, a paleontological consultant unconnected to the auction, agreed.

"Some of them are outstanding," Galiano said. The sale, he added, offers "things for the collector, things for the decorator, things for the scientist -- it seems to be across the board in the range of appeal."

The idea for the auction started when some paleontologists offered a few of their private holdings to the auction house to sell. Guernsey's, which has done its share of unusual auctions -- from Titanic memorabilia to graffiti art -- decided to take it on and searched out other items to add.

"To be different just to be different is not what we're about," Ettinger said. "On the other hand, if there's a legitimately spectacular field that hasn't been covered, why wouldn't we?"

Ettinger pointed out the widespread fascination of dinosaurs. "I'd be hard-pressed to come up with a field that seems to span more age levels, where you could be 4, you could be 94, and just as interested," he said.

Prices on the items range from a couple of hundred dollars, to several thousand and beyond. Ettinger said more than half had no minimum price limit to meet.

He said he had been in touch with museums to alert them to the materials in case they want to bid. In 1997, the Field Museum of Chicago paid $8.3 million at auction for the nearly complete skeleton of "Sue," a Tyrannosaurus rex found in South Dakota.

At an auction in California in 1999, dinosaur fans spent about $980,000 for hundreds of prehistoric fossils, including one bid of $46,000 for a baby Ichthyosaur, a sea reptile that lived 190 million years ago.

There are all kinds of dinosaur parts in this auction -- teeth, bones, eggs, skulls, even a couple of full skeletons. A range of dinosaurs are represented -- Triceratops, Tyrannosaurus Rex, Allosaurus, Stygimoloch, among others.

Also included is the skull from a saber-toothed cat, the skull of a mammoth and a reconstructed jaw of a prehistoric shark, which measures almost 10 feet tall. (Estimates put these types of sharks as measuring up to 50 feet long.)

Boris Matsanov, a fossil dealer from Cliffside Park, N.J., who is offering up the mammoth skull for sale, said there was something unique in having a fossil of one's own, rather than seeing it displayed in a museum.

"It gives you a special feeling, especially when you can touch it. In a museum it's a little bit different," the 39-year-old said. "That's why people want to collect them, they can actually hold them."

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Guernsey's: http://www.guernseys.com