Fossil trade
buying and selling fossils
The fossil trade is the purchase and sale of fossils. This is at times done illegally with stolen fossils, and important scientific specimens are lost each year. The trade is lucrative, and many celebrities collect fossils.
The fossil trade has attracted criticism from many paleontologists, who regard the private ownership of fossils to be damaging to science.
History
Ever since the early 19th century, there has been a considerable commercial interest in fossils. The increasing growth of the fossil market in recent decades is often traced back to the auction of the Tyrannosaurus skeleton known as Sue in 1997 for $8.3 million. According to the head of science and natural history at Christie's, James Hyslop, the market in fossils has been growing consistently since 2007. Due to the increased awareness of the lucrative nature of fossils, many landowners have become more reluctant to work with scientists, preferring to instead offer prospecting rights to the highest bidder.
The international trade in fossils for use in alternative medicine, commonly referred to as "dragon bone", was worth US$700 million annually as of 2010.
Fossil poaching is common in Mongolia.
“Fossil trade” enters the record as buying and selling fossils. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Fossil, trade and buying can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 12, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q8564898. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1997, 2007 and 2010.
The absence of detail may reflect summary conventions rather than a lack of surviving documentation. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
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This entry incorporates text from “Fossil trade” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.