Fossils on the Market: An Attempt to Characterise the Auction World (2010–2022)

The collection of fossils supports a thriving market that is largely unknown to the academic community. The fossil market is characterised by fairs, online shops, physical stores and auction sales that attract hundreds of thousands of people each year. The sale of fossils to private individuals is often perceived as a threat by professional palaeontologists, who fear that valuable, maybe unique, specimens are being removed from scientific inquiry. In this paper we explore the global fossil market based on data shared online by international auction houses. We analysed the sales of fossils made by 115 auction houses over a period of 12 years (January 2010 to December 2022) whose auction results were still available online in 2022. Thirty parameters were collected for each auctioned item, including taxonomic identification, provenance, estimates and realised prices, etc. A total of 10.471 records were analysed. The database also includes high profile auction results, such as the Stan auction (Tyrannosaurus rex sold by Christie's in 2020 for around 30 million US dollars). Even if many (54%) of the auctioned fossils come from Africa and Asia, only a small minority of the auction houses operates from these continents. These results are useful not only to learn more about the international fossil trade and to provide relevant information to auction houses, fossil preparators and sellers, but also to better assess the economic value of fossils from an insurance point of view, which is useful information for museum and university collections. They also provide a basis to address legal and policy issues of the private fossil trade.