Dinosaur hunter stumbles upon million dollar discovery – BBC News

The first stegosaurus skeleton to go under the hammer will fetch millions of dollars in New York. But the extraordinary discovery was made by chance, thousands of miles away to the west, during one man’s birthday walk, writes Stephen Smith.

It’s every child’s dream to wander through the garden and come face to face with a real dinosaur, ideally one of the less terrifying dinosaurs that eat a sensible plant-based diet.

For most of us, a dream is all it is, but not for a man named Jason Cooper.

He has encountered dinosaurs in his backyard not once, but on many different occasions.

When he takes a walk through his estate in the American Southwest, he is more likely to encounter a creature from prehistoric times.

Yet he may never encounter one quite like the one he came across a few years ago, an animal so large that if it appeared on a London street it would rival an old double-decker Routemaster bus. bus. – although you’ll want to be careful which one you board.

It was a huge stegosaurus, in excellent condition for a beast that has spent the last 150 million years underground.

It stands almost 11 feet tall and over 27 feet long from the top of its head to the tip of its scaly tail.

Mr. Cooper named it “Apex” because its formidable size would have made it a dominant animal in its environment.

With the help of some friends, he cleaned it up and put it back together.

And if you’ve always had the fantasy of encountering a dinosaur on your lawn, you can make it come true — if you can get your hands on four to six million dollars.

Apex is about to become the first stegosaurus to go under the hammer at auction.

The bidding is expected to proceed smoothly. Dinosaur fossils have become coveted trophies, coveted by successful tech entrepreneurs and Hollywood stars.

This has caused much consternation among academic paleontologists, who argue that scientific research will be hampered if they end up in private hands and the public is denied the opportunity to appreciate them.

Nicolas Cage reportedly bought a tyrannosaurus skull for more than £185,000 in 2007 after a bidding war with Leonardo DiCaprio, although he returned it after it was discovered to have been stolen.

Mr. Cooper is a professional fossil hunter who has made a childhood dream of discovering dinosaurs a reality, with the pragmatism of a theater lover who decides to rent near Broadway.

He and his family live in Colorado atop a geological feature known as the Morrison Formation, a stretch of sedimentary rock dating to the Jurassic period that covers 600,000 square miles of the western United States.

The Morrison Formation is to dinosaurs what California was to gold nuggets in the mid-1800s.

And to the romantically inclined, Mr. Cooper and others like him are gold diggers on America’s last frontier, the unknown land beneath their own muddy boots.

He owns just under 100 hectares and in the last twelve years he has removed ten dinosaurs from it. And to hear him tell it, packing up his biggest find yet was literally a walk in the park.

It was his 45th birthday and when his friend asked him what he wanted, he said the best gift would be a new dinosaur and so off they went. And as they walked up the mountainside, Mr. Cooper saw a femur sticking out of the rock face.

“We looked around. My friend found some vertebrae. I said, ‘Oh my god, this is going to be a really great birthday!'”

The rock face of clay, mud and sand where Cooper saw Apex resembles a cross-section of all the deposits that have settled in that part of the world over time.

“I saw the tips of a tail sticking out and some large plates on its back. I could see it was still curled up.”

After the fossil hunters gathered as much data as possible about where Apex was found, its bones were strapped into protective “jackets” made of plaster and burlap and lifted onto a trailer.

Back at Cooper’s dinosaur shop, work began to clean and reassemble the stegosaurus, using equipment such as sandblasting, pneumatic chisels and high-powered microscopes.

The fossils encased the bones in the rocks; this was painstakingly removed to expose the animal’s skeleton.

“Apex is 70% complete, which is incredible for a dinosaur, especially a stegosaurus,” says Cooper.

To put that in context, ideas about “completeness” in the fossil world are almost as spiky as a stegosaurus’ tail, according to Cassandra Hatton of Sotheby’s, who is overseeing the sale.

“No one has ever found 100% of a dinosaur. “A stegosaurus as good as this is hard to find,” she says. “I think it’s going to be incredibly important.”

Apex did not appear to be damaged when fighting other creatures. The only indication of wear and tear was that the lower vertebrae had fused to the pelvis, a result of arthritis, indicating that the stegosaurus enjoyed a long life before spending an eternity in the ground.

Now it will be carefully disassembled again, ahead of the long and steady overland journey of Cooper’s distribution to Sotheby’s trading rooms in Manhattan, where Apex will be reassembled and shown to the public and potential buyers in July.

It’s been 200 years since natural historians began classifying dinosaurs, and their successors are lamenting the sale of Apex on this anniversary.

Steve Brusatte, professor of paleontology and evolution at the University of Edinburgh who is originally from the US, says specimens of the stegosaurus are very rare and, if real, belong in a museum.

“It is a great shame when a fossil like this, which could arouse and arouse the curiosity of so many people, just disappears into the mansion of an oligarch.”

In Britain, fossil enthusiasts are generally allowed to keep smaller, common species such as shells and corals, but must report any significant find.

Such restrictions don’t exist in the US, where anyone who digs up a dinosaur on their own property has the right to do whatever they want with it, and that includes making a nice profit from it.

Jason Cooper defends the sale of the stegosaurus he found, arguing that he and his critics are essentially on the same page.

“The collectors and philanthropists who buy these dinosaurs can enjoy them at home for a few years, but then they have the fossils named after them and give them to institutions,” he told the BBC. Cooper says he has donated to public collections himself.

When the hammer comes down on the sale, Cooper will be back in dinosaur land, looking for more fossils, some of which he will give away to public collections. Of course, they aren’t exactly scarce where he comes from. He compares finding dinosaurs to another childhood dream that sounds almost as unlikely. “It’s like looking for gold coins, only you know where the king’s counting house was.”

Stephen Smith is a writer and broadcaster