Dinosaurs, of course, survived the K/Pg extinction, in the form of Aves. As we have seen, Aves may have survived while Enanitornithes and other Mesozoic bird groups died from a combination of a diet of stored food (worms, seeds, etc.) accessible with their toothless beaks and a shoreline-dwelling habit in a world where the forests had collapsed. In the post-impact world the small body size and insulated bodies may have allowed them to better survive than a lot of other animal groups. In the earliest Cenozoic birds underwent a tremendous radiation, and in a few instances evolved into the top predators or largest herbivores of the region. But it must be admitted, these were exceptions to the rule. The Cenozoic Era has been an "Age of Mammals".

The small body size and burrowing habit probably favored mammalian survival relative to dinosaurs and pterosaurs, for instance. Mammal species diversity and body size both increase very quickly after the dust settled and the Cenozoic began. Indeed, the placental mammal diversification of the Paleocene Epoch is the original case study of the concept of "adaptive radiation."

The global environment of the early Cenozoic (Paleocene and Eocene Epochs of the Paleogene Period) was warmer and wetter than the modern world, not terribly dissimilar to the previous Cretaceous. Rain forests were common in many regions--even in the mountains of the American West. During the transition to the Oligocene Epoch of the Paleogene Period the world underwent the first of a series of events which cooled and dried the world. In the subsequent Miocene and Pliocene Epochs of the Neogene Period a new habitat--grasslands--spread across the world in regions too wet for desert but too dry for forest.

In this grassy world a new lineage arose: Hominini. These (or more properly, we) are a branch of primates which came from arboreal ancestors but became adapted for bipedal life in the open places. During the subsequent Quaternary Period (comprised of the Pleistocene and current Holocene Epochs) the Earth entered an Ice Age, where the climate cycled through glacial phases (where ice sheets spread over vast parts of the continents) and interglacials (when the ice melted back, but when the temperatures were still cooler than earlier times.) During the last 350 thousand years or so our own species arose in Africa and spread to every continent.

And as we spread, some humans came across the bones of ancient giant reptiles and pondered what they might have been. And eventually developed scientific approaches to figure out... well, pretty much everything from all the previous lectures!

But it hasn't just been scientific examination. We've also tried to (literally) picture what dinosaurs might have looked like. So a large part of the legacy of dinosaurs is our attempts to reconstruct their appearance.

Who Collects Fossils? Issues Around the Commercial Trade in Fossils: Some fossils obviously ARE commodities: coal, petroleum, chalk, diatomite, etc. And as such they are commercially bought and sold.

But what about the sort of fossils that this course focused on: the body and trace fossils of organisms as object?

In order to look into this, we need to consider the different types of people who search for fossils, and their motivations.

There are professional paleontologists: normally motivated by research, and normally employed by museums, universities, and other academic institutions. However, some might be employed by resource-management organizations (such as the US or state geological surveys; National Parks or Monuments; state parks; etc.): some of these may do research as well, but often they have the additional job of overseeing the protection of fossil sites and so forth. (And these jobs aren't mutually exclusive: the recently-retired State Paleontologist of Montana was also a Professor at Montana State University AND a curator of the Museum of the Rockies!) Professional paleontologists are the only group likely to develop major expeditions, and are the only group likely to prospect in formations that aren't yet known to produce lots of fossils: after all, discovery is our job! Given professionals tend to specialize on particular taxa (and thus might not be limited to working in just one region), but some work mostly on particular faunas or formations.

Another group is avocational collectors: hobbyists, enthusiasts, "amateurs" (in both the sense that the don't get paid to find fossils, and that they do it because they love it.) Avocational collectors are BY FAR the largest community. The tend to generate interest in fossils, and in Nature and Science, among the general public. Many important finds have been made by avocational collectors (which they often donate to museum collections). In general they tend mostly to prospect sites known to produce large quantities of common fossils (after all, they are more likely to do this for a day on the weekend, not a six-week expedition.)

The smallest group are commercial collectors. They tend to specialize in a particular geographic region and a particular set of formations known to produce good fossils: after all, they are doing this for a livelihood, so they need to have some likely return on their investment. In some cases, they are the best outfits able to field crews and run preparation labs in the regions they operate, although some teams might be ill-equipped or relatively unskilled (but the same can be said about some avocational and professionals...) In some cases, the commercial collectors cooperate with researchers to bring the fossils into the public trust; however, in some cases (as discussed below), there are conflicts between the goals of professionals and commercials.

Some historical commercial collectors were major contributors in the history of paleontology, such as Mary Anning (1799-1847) of England and the Sternberg Family of the western U.S. (The latter are an extension of the practice of hired crews used by the professional paleontologists: a very common practice in the 19th Century in the American West.)

Proponents of commercial collecting and sales of fossils put forth some important arguments:

• Are sometimes able to do work that museums & universities aren't able to do, perhaps because they are working in formations that professionals do not work in as much or going to places they aren't exploring at the moment
• At least some of the commercial collectors are skilled individuals
• If not collected, fossils already exposed will erode away
• In the US & some other countries, fossils are considered mineral rights that private land owners may dispose of as they wish
• Commercial collection may an avenue for avocational collectors who do not want to go on to be research professionals
• Many fossil species are common, so that sale of these to private citizens does not represent a loss of information to Science

(Here is a commentary taking the pro-commercial collector position).

However, others point out that there are many problems with the commercial collection of fossils:

• Fossils sold to private citizen are removed from research, the public, and posterity and public trust. (In some cases, they might be destroyed as they are sliced and transformed into jewelry or decorative wall hangings).
• Because they cannot pay for access to private lands (NSF and other funding agencies don't have "bribe" as a category...)
• In at least some places, commercial collecting done by people without training (damaging fossils, and sometimes people!)
• Commoditization of fossils encourages:
  • Overexploitation of the resources (until sites get "dug out")
  • Collecting for "trophy" fossils, not for the scientific data they have (even visually boring specimens may have key information)
  • Incentivizes frauds (see more about that below)

(Here is a commentary taking the anti-commercial collection position.)

The most famous story of a conflict between commercial collectors and professional paleontologists, as well as issues of land management, Native American rights, and much more, is the case of "Sue" the Tyrannosaurus rex. In 1990 the Black Hills Institute (BHI, a commercial collecting firm operating out of Hill City, South Dakota) was exploring for fossils in the Hell Creek Formation (the latest Cretaceous of western North America) on the Cheyenne River Indian Reservation. Team member Sue Hendrickson went off on her own and discovered what turned out to be the largest (at the time of discovery) and most complete (even to this day) T. rex skeleton ever found. The BHI dug up the specimen and brought it back to Hill City. However, a dispute arose: the land owner (Maurice Williams) claimed that the $5000 they had paid him was NOT for the specimen, but simply the right to prospect his land; Williams argued that the specimen belonged to him, not BHI. Because Williams is a member of the Sioux nation, this dispute became an issue of federal law. In 1992 the FBI and National Guard came to BHI and took control of the fossil. A legal decision in 1995 determined that "Sue" was indeed Williams property. The specimen went to the auction block at Sotheby's, where for $8,362,500 the Field Museum in Chicago acquired the specimen (backed by Disney and McDonalds).

(The story of "Sue" has been the focus of two different documentary: a markedly pro-Larson one from 2014, and a more balanced one by the TV series NOVA from 1997.

The legacy of the "Sue" incident was to drive a rift between many commercial collectors and professional paleontologists; to increase the sales of dramatic fossil specimens in stores and at auction; an increase of the perception of privately-owned fossils as a prestige item of the rich to display; and to increase the market for faked fossils to fill the market place.

Dinosaurs (more than all other fossil organisms) make up the high ticket, high esteem items in the commercial fossil trade. As the world recovered from the 2008 Great Recession, the 2010s and 2020s have seen an explosion in the sale of expensive dinosaur fossils, normally at the great auction houses of the world. These can run in the hundreds-of-thousands-to-millions-of--US-dollars range, and culminated in the October 6, 2020 sale of "Stan" the Tyrannosaurus rex (also a Black Hills Institute specimen!) for an astonishing $31.9 million dollars! (As of this time, the buyer remains anonymous and their plans for this specimen remains unknown, but the specimen is destined for a new museum in Abu Dhabi.) On July 17, 2024 the "Stan" purchase was surpassed by a complete large Stegosaurus skeleton which sold for $44.6 million dollars!

Not only has there been an increase in fossil sales; there has also been an increase in the creation of fake fossils to sell on the markets. The most famous post-"Sue" hoaxed fossil is the "Archaeoraptor liaoningensis". A 1999 issue of National Geographic Magazine featuring the newly-discovered Yixian and Jiufotang feathered dinosaur fossils announced a fossil of an as-yet unnamed species. Its front end was very derived, but its hips and tail were fairly primitive. Paleontologists (including this one!) were very curious about this specimen, as it had not been described in the technical literature. And there was a good reason for that: it was a hoax, and every attempt to publish it in a scientific journal failed peer-review as the reviewers noted the falsehood of the specimen. In February 2000, National Geographic announced that it was indeed a fake, combining the front end of a bird (Yanornis) and the rear end of a dromeosaurid (Microraptor). A study in 2001 eventually showed the steps needed to construct the hoax. The hoax had been done in China, where a market had already been developed in the sale of fossils (despite the fact this is illegal in the People's Republic!): the more complete the fossil, the better! The concern wasn't the information from the fossil, but rather how much money they could make from it.

Who Owns the Fossil Record? Laws and Stakeholders: We have dealt primarily with who discovers fossils, and the sale of fossils, but that actually skipped over a step: who actually owns them? Is it the collector? Or someone else? Are they objects to be possessed, or part of the global heritage of all, or something in-between? And who are the stakeholders involved?

As with many aspects of laws and regulations, the legal answer (if not the ethical ones) depends on where you are. And this isn't just different from country to country; it can also vary from place to place within a country. For instance, in the United States fossils are generally regarded as mineral rights rather than antiquities (such as artifacts and human remains). The laws that govern them depends on the type of land concerned:

• On private land, fossils are the property of the land owner, who typically can do with them whatever they want, including sell them
• Fossils on National Parks and National Monuments are highly protected and considered part of the national heritage, requiring major permitting in order to excavate them. Even after they are excavated and accessioned into an appropriate collection, they are still technically property of the U.S. rather than the institution involved.
• Other types of public land might have different rules: State land, County land, Bureau of Land Management, National Forest, etc., etc. They might require permits on whether you can collect at all; what type of fossils; how much you can take out; where the fossils must go after collected (i.e., can you keep them? Do they have to go to a museum? Etc.); and so on. Again, these remain (on paper) property of the relevant government (the U.S., the State, the County, etc.) and are held in trust by the collecting institution.

These protections don't always work, though: they have to actually be enforced. Mismanagement of Fossil Cycad National Monument in the 1920-1950s was such that people would just take away fossils from the Monument! With no more fossils to display or protect, the National Monument was decommissioned in 1957.

Other nations have different laws. In some fossils are regarded as protected antiquities or as part of the natural heritage, and are the property of the State (or the Crown), regardless of the private vs. public nature of the land they are found on (both the Republic of Mongolia and the People's Republic of China, from which many dinosaur fossils have come, regard all fossils as property of the State). In others there are no protections anywhere except their national parks. And many nations have protections that effectively exist only on paper: big "grey" markets (really black markets, but with protection of government officials having been paid off.)

Of recent concern are the rights of indigenous populations with regards to fossils found on their lands. For instance, many fossils discovered and collected in the American West since the 1800s were found on reservations or other Native lands, and yet the local governing bodies were not consulted with regards to their collection. Similar situations exist in other parts of the world with their own indigenous peoples. For instance, are the fossils found in Tendaguru Hill in Tanzania the property of the national Tanzanian government or the Wamwera people of that particular region? Answers to this have bearing on the question of potential future repatriation of these materials.

Issues in "Paleontoethics": The questions raised above are part of the newly-coined field of "paleontoethics". (This has been called "paleoethics" for many years, but a 2021 paper on the topic suggested this slightly longer name. The authors of this paper point out several important issues. For instance, the actual land from which the fossils are found can be disrupted or degraded from:

• Cultural and scientific illiteracy on the part of the decision-makers and society in general, leading to the types of bad decisions below
• Unsustainable mining of the fossil resources (see the example of the Fossil Cycad National Monument above
• Urban development building over the fossil site (this has happened in Prince Georges County several different times in the last 25 years, including in University-adjacent properties...)
• Deficient statutory protection
• Deficient administration
• Smuggling and illegal collecting
• Inappropriate practices by scientific researchers (for instance, extremely disruptive collecting procedures)
• Unsustainable tourism and leisure activities

The authors call for sound management of fossil-producing localities based on scientific, socio-cultural (including incorporation of indigenous rights and practices), and socio-economic criteria.

One important issue in paleontoethics is the repatriation of specimens either illegally or unethically obtained. There have been several recent cases of illegally-acquired specimens being returned to their home countries. Some have involved the appropriate law-enforcement authorities seizing the illegal fossils (as in the case of some Mongolian dinosaurs confiscated by U.S. Customs officials and returned to Mongolia) or by the voluntary action of those who bought the illegal fossils working with the home nation. Examples of the latter case include the return of poached Deinocherius fossils by a fossil collector to Mongolia (where in some cases the opposite ends of the same bones of the same individual were held!) and the eggs and embryos of the giant oviraptorosaur Beibeilong returned to China by the U.S. museum which had obtained it.

An ongoing debate is the potential return of fossils collected by colonial powers in the 1800s and early 1900s to the original nation. For instance, the classic Late Jurassic fossils of Tendaguru Hill were taken back to Germany (and later, the UK) during these nation's imperial occupation of that nation. However, debate between the parties is ongoing, including such issues as the sufficiency of the museums in the home institutions to maintain and curate the fossils and whether the fossils belong to the national government or the indigenous people of the Tendaguru region.

On an even broader perspective, are any fossils really the property of individuals, institutions, peoples, or nations? Legally (and practically) there needs to be some principle of responsibility and authority so that the material is properly managed. But an alternative perspective is that fossils are part of the collective heritage of all humanity. They represent the world before any modern populations, institutions, or societies (and for all but the youngest fossils, before our species itself). While we would clearly need some proper management authority for the care and maintenance of this fossil heritage, this more global perspective regards fossils as property of us all collectively, held in trust by the (geologically temporary) human institutions for the sake of us now and for posterity.

Looking to the future, it is clear that commercial fossil collection is unlikely to disappear anytime soon (particularly in the U.S.), and there are historic inequities to address. Some points of paleontoethics and related issues to address:

• Rethinking the "all or nothing" mentality of fossil ownership (the "fossils-as-trophies" point of view). For consideration: using the approach common in art museums, where a private citizen might "own" a piece of art but it is displayed, curated, stored, and protected by the museum. In this model, fossils might technically be "owned" by a private citizen, but become effectively part of the museum's collection and available for display and research. (If this were the situation, it would be likely that the owner would have to be consulted before destructive analyses like isotopic analyses and histological sectioning.)
• Encouraging private citizens and commercial collectors to donate scientifically-significant specimens to museum collections (the above point is a pathway that might ease this decision)
• Inclusion of representatives of indigenous populations in making decisions about fossils collected on their land
• And most importantly, education and outreach so that the population as a whole (as well as decision-makers and collectors) understand the scientific and cultural significance of the remains of the ancient world

Dinosaurs have also had a legacy in popular culture. On the broadest level, the word "dinosaur" became a metaphor for "that which is out of date, ponderous, and useless, and ultimately doomed to failure" (and possibly "has a might body, but a tiny brain". Such a metaphor goes back the later Victorian and early 20th Century interpretation of dinosaurs, and has (thankfully) become a lot less common in popular discourse.

As discussed early in the course, dinosaurs became the featured "stars" of natural history museums in the late 19th and early 20th Centuries. They were similarly featured in other forms of popular science outreach: books, documentaries, and so on.

Dinosaurs have had a long history in popular entertainment (books, art, movies, comics, cartoons, TV shows, video games, toys, etc.), being adapted to every new modes of artistic expression as time goes by.

During 20th Century, dinosaurs got the reputation of being "kids stuff" and not "real science" (especially as they actually proved very popular with young audiences).

Many popular (and generally youth-oriented) versions of dinosaurs in early 20th Century books (Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's The Lost World, Edgar Rice Burroughs Earth's Core and Land that Time Forgot), comic strips, and movies galore:
Gertie the Dinosaur (1914, one of the first cartoons ever made):

The Lost World (1925, one of the first full-length stop-motion special effects movies) (some clips):

King Kong (1933: like The Lost World it used the paleoart of Charles R. Knight for the dinosaur models.) (Here is the classic "Kong vs. oversized Tyrannosaurus fight):

Another burst of dinosaur popularity (replaying the earlier one) in the 1950s, via American and Japanese monster movies. Another wave of dinosaurs in popular culture came with the 1993 film Jurassic Park and continues to this day. (That isn't to say dinosaurs were unpopular before this! If they were, Spielberg and Universal Pictures wouldn't have risked millions of dollars and the invention of entirely new special effects for the movie!)

Jurassic Park represents the largest mass entertainment expression of the then-two decades old Dinosaur Renaissance in paleontology. The name comes from an article in Scientific American from 1975 by Robert T. Bakker, which summarized the new thinking of paleontologists such as him, Ostrom, and so forth. Through this article, some associated documentaries, and various other books, articles, and the like, it represents the introduction of the new scientific interpretations of dinosaurs to the public.

The success of Jurassic Park led to the big budget documentaries such as the Walking with Dinosaurs franchise and other projects of the late 1990s and early 2000s. The Dinosaur Renaissance (and again, the resurgence with Jurassic Park) also led a lot of students to pursue careers in paleontology: more people working in vertebrate paleontology in general, and dinosaur paleontology in particular, than ever before

So why are dinosaurs so popular?

• Obviously they are weird and wonderful
• For children, they are:
  • Fearsome, but harmless, since "they are extinct" (okay, this idea fails under scientific scrutiny, but...)
  • The represent a sphere of the world that young children can master (lots of names and details) that their parents might not know, and so becomes the first time that they experience the upper hand
• And the fascinating aspects of dinosaurs lead people to better appreciate the natural world and how we use science to understand it

(The last reason, of course, is the justification for this course!)

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Last modified: 18 July 2024