00:00Devin Pendleton is here with us, Bloomberg News wealth reporter.
00:04There's so much to unpack here, literally and rhetorically.
00:09It's shocking to me how big of a market this has become so quickly.
00:12I remember I first read about this maybe less than a year ago, and it seems like it's only gone
00:16up.
00:16I was reading in your article, financier Ken Griffin spent $44.6 million on a stegosaurus.
00:23Leonardo DiCaprio, Nick Cage, other celebrities have also gotten into these.
00:26But when one is purchasing a giant dinosaur skeleton, how do you know if it's authentic or not?
00:33What are you looking for?
00:34Because it sounds like there are a lot of copies out there, potentially.
00:37There could be potential copies out there.
00:40You want to make sure, of course, what you're buying, what you're spending millions of dollars on is authentic.
00:43And so there's a lot of paperwork behind that that you're going to really need to ask for.
00:48And by paperwork, you want to know exactly where the dinosaur was found.
00:52You want to know the coordinates.
00:53And really importantly, you want to see video and photo documentation from the minute a spade was put in the
00:59dirt to kind of take this thing out.
01:01Because there's funny business that can happen between when the bones come out of the ground and between when they're
01:06reconstructed as a specimen that you buy.
01:08And you need to be able to track all of it.
01:10That's so funny.
01:11It's like a provenance for works in the art world.
01:13But this time, you want to see the whole process of this thing being excavated.
01:18Exactly.
01:18And provenance is the very word that they use.
01:20Really?
01:21All right.
01:21Well, look at that.
01:22I knew a thing.
01:24I do want to ask you, where did this market come from?
01:26How big is it at this point?
01:27And do you expect it to grow?
01:29So the market's really old.
01:31I mean, this goes back, of course, since dinosaurs were discovered in the Gilded Age.
01:35There's great colorful stories about Gilded Age barons kind of fighting over finding dinosaurs and laying claim to finding great
01:42dinosaurs and funding digs.
01:43So it's not new, but certainly it's taken on new velocity in recent years, you could definitely say.
01:51I mean, even in recent months, even, who knows where it could go?
01:56I mean, this really is sort of worth kind of at the very beginning of this market is sort of
02:00a mature, like real sort of investable part of the market space where you see auctions, houses really getting into
02:07it and putting money behind it and muscle and entire shows and auctions dedicated to this space.
02:13Like there's a lot of potential.
02:14It has a lot of, you know, buyers and sellers, traders, dealers, pretty excited.
02:19Is there any kind of regulation?
02:22I mean, you talk about commercial fossil brokers in your piece.
02:25I didn't know that was a thing.
02:27Who was keeping track of where these are coming from, how many of them are?
02:31And as you mentioned the piece, like sometimes you can recognize that that's a skull that you've excavated or that
02:35you own because they have, you were telling me, they have very unique qualities and scars or marks and they
02:41can be identified.
02:42Certainly, especially if you're talking about the skulls.
02:45I mean, especially the T-Rex, right?
02:47Yeah, they're very, they're very big and they've had incredibly violent lifestyles.
02:51So you're going to see marks from, from disease.
02:54You'll see holes that are signs of healed wounds.
02:56You might even see gashes, things that look like bite marks.
03:00I mean, you're going to see a lot more trauma there than you would like on a human skeleton.
03:04And it's not just knowing that you recognize that skull, but there's just not that many of them because there's
03:11so few that are,
03:12really in so that you could put together to be back in one piece that they're just singular.
03:17And they've given them names too, which really like also just, you know, clicks it into your head.
03:22Like, oh, that's Stan.
03:22I know that skull.
03:24We've got about 30 seconds left, but why is this a market?
03:28What is so compelling about these, these remnants from the past?
03:31And, and especially the T-Rex, what is it about these creatures that people are just so drawn to?
03:36I mean, it's such a, just part of consciousness.
03:39Like since we were little, they're just, they fascinate everybody.
03:41There's really nobody who I've come across in the years working on this story.
03:45That's not like, dang, that's cool.
03:46You know, it's just something very primal in us that finds this fascinating.
03:50And the T-Rex is amazing.
03:52As someone put it to me, it can just eat you in one bite.
03:55There's not a lot of things out there that can do that.
03:57And they're just cool.
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