I tried to find out if the fossil I bought online was real. Then I realized I was asking the wrong question

By Jacopo Prisco, CNN

(CNN) — It stands to reason that a 95 million-year-old tooth shipped to my home would have a rich past. But what ensued after I bought it online for about $100 revealed how, for such relics and those who covet them, the present is in some ways much more complicated.

I always wanted to own a fossil, and once the algorithm picked up on that desire, ads flooded my Instagram feed. It then became impossible to resist the thrill of purchasing a piece of one of the largest predators that ever existed: Spinosaurus, a semiaquatic meat-eater that could reach almost 60 feet (about 18 meters) in length — longer and heavier than Tyrannosaurus rex.

When the package arrived, in a pretty glass dome and with a preprinted certificate of authenticity that stated it came from North Africa, the long pointy tooth looked the part to my untrained eyes: yellowish brown, with varying textures and a stonelike appearance. But some obvious cracks that suggested the specimen had perhaps been patched together from multiple fragments left me wondering: Was it real?

To find out, I took it to London’s Natural History Museum, where Susannah Maidment, a senior researcher and fossil expert, examined it.

“Yeah, it’s a fossil, for sure,” she said. “It’s got a rounded cross section with ridges down the front and back, so it’s probably a Spinosaurus tooth.”

To my relief, I hadn’t been duped. But it turns out my fossil wasn’t as rare as I thought.

“This is almost certainly from Morocco, because almost all Spinosaurus fossils that we know of are from the Kem Kem formation of Morocco, and they’re intensively excavated there,” Maidment added, referring to a fossil bed in southeastern Morocco that has yielded an abundance of predatory dinosaur specimens. “The thing about teeth is that dinosaurs and other reptiles shed them continuously, so one dinosaur will have many, many teeth over its lifetime. And so they’re very common.”

As a result, according to Maidment, I probably paid too much for it. However, her next observation quickly replaced that concern with another: “This … has almost certainly been illegally exported and illegally excavated,” she said.

“This specimen — you have it illegally.”

A fossil craze

Last year, a Stegosaurus skeleton nicknamed “Apex,” measuring nearly 27 feet long (about 8 meters), sold for $44.6 million at a Sotheby’s auction in New York City, becoming the most valuable fossil ever sold at auction.

Hedge fund manager Ken Griffin reportedly scooped up the specimen, which was discovered in 2022 on private land in Colorado, and it is currently on loan at New York’s American Museum of Natural History.

The sale was just one in a series of recent high-profile auctions that sent near-complete dinosaur skeletons into private ownership. But the trend can be traced back to the sale of Sue, one of the most complete and largest T. rex fossils ever found. It was unearthed in 1990 and sold at auction in 1997 for $8.36 million after a long legal battle over its ownership.

Even though Chicago’s Field Museum of Natural History purchased Sue and still has it on display, the pooling together of private funds led to its acquisition and kick-started the era of big-ticket fossil auctions. Seventy-one T. rex specimens are now in private hands, versus 61 held by public trusts, according to a recent study.

Peter Lovisek, a fossil broker and curator at Fossil Realm, a gallery in Ottawa, said a key turning point for the market — “where these pieces began to be seen as cultural icons, artworks, investment assets” — was the auction of a 40-foot-long T. rex named “Stan,” which sold for $31.8 million in 2020.

The media frenzy surrounding Stan, which is part of a planned exhibition at the upcoming Natural History Museum Abu Dhabi in the United Arab Emirates, brought fossils into the mainstream, Lovisek added.

“Since then, Instagram has become a hub for the fossil industry,” he said. “A major part of our strategy is to focus on Instagram storytelling, and Instagram is connecting curators, dealers, diggers.”

CNN reached out to Instagram for comment but has not received a response.

You are now spoiled for choice if you want to buy fossils online. Most online shops offer a range of price points starting at a few dollars and going up into the low thousands, whereas Lovisek said he takes a more upmarket approach, from a few thousand dollars to the six-figure range.

And things are just getting started, according to Salomon Aaron, director of David Aaron, a London gallery dealing in ancient art and fossils. “I think the dinosaur trade is actually still incredibly undervalued,” Aaron said. “Relative to the art market, we are very much at the beginning, at the start of the dinosaur fossil trade.”

On the other hand, it’s been over 200 years since the first dinosaur fossil was given a name, Megalosaurus, in 1824. Specimens have now been found on every continent, and more than 50 countries have contributed named species to science, with the United States, China, Argentina, Brazil, Canada, France, Germany, India, Mongolia, South Africa, Spain and the United Kingdom topping the rankings.

One enduring misconception, perhaps fueled by the multimillion-dollar auctions, is that fossils are rare. “Across the world, people assume that everything’s going to be unmanageably expensive, but that’s not the case,” said Matt Dale, who owns Mr Wood’s Fossils, a fossil shop in Edinburgh, Scotland, which also sells online. His cheapest dinosaur fossils are priced under 10 pounds (about $13.50), and include bone fragments, teeth and eggshells.

“I get a lot of questions that I hear again and again. One, where do you get all this stuff? Two, is it real? And three, why is it so cheap?” Dale said. “The bulk of the stuff in my shop comes from unusually rich sites, where there’s an awful lot of material, which makes it much more practical and feasible to collect it and sell it on a commercial basis. There’s an artificial impression of how rare fossils are, and that’s just — that’s not the case for some things.”

Most fossil shops in the world will have some of these affordable items, Dale said, including ammonites, or shelled mollusks, from Madagascar; fish from Wyoming’s Green River Formation; shark teeth from South Carolina and Florida; and trilobites from the Erfoud area in Morocco’s northern Kem Kem region — the same place from where my Spinosaurus tooth likely comes.

Banning exports

After telling me that she thought my fossil was illegal, Maidment explained that “the Moroccan fossil law states that you must have a permit for excavation and that you must have a permit for export, and you can only get a permit for export if you have an excavation license. Unless your seller is able to show you both, they have certainly excavated it illegally and exported it illegally.”

The online shop I bought the Spinosaurus tooth from is based in the UK and has a page on its website that asserts its commitment to ethical sourcing of artifacts. The company didn’t respond to requests for an interview or comment on the origin of my fossil. Other online retailers offering similar merchandise that I contacted also didn’t respond to my interview requests.

However, the shop could have legally purchased the fossils from a third party, or at one of many fossil trade shows such as Arizona’s Tucson Gem, Mineral & Fossil Showcase. Held annually in January and February, the Arizona event bills itself as the largest gem and mineral show in the world. CNN reached out to the Tucson Gem, Mineral & Fossil Showcase for comment but has not received a response.

Morocco is not the only country imposing restrictions on fossil exports with the goal of preserving its cultural heritage. Export bans are also in place in Argentina, Brazil, China and Mongolia.

“All around the world, different countries have different laws. In the UK and the US, if you find something on your land, you can do whatever you want with it,” while in some parts of South America, for example, the person who discovers an artifact has a weaker claim, Maidment said.

Brazilian fossils in particular, according to a law established in 1942, don’t belong to the finder, noted Taissa Rodrigues, a professor of paleontology at the Federal University of Espirito Santo in Brazil. “It belongs to the country,” Rodrigues said. “That means, if you find a fossil, you’re not its owner, so that’s why you’re not allowed to sell it, because it’s not up for you to decide.”

But Morocco seems to fall into a sort of legal gray area when it comes to fossil exports, said Maidment and David Martill, emeritus professor from the UK’s University of Portsmouth. Despite laws in place intended to regulate export of these artifacts, almost all fossils excavated in Morocco end up on the commercial market, according to Martill. A small portion fuel the local souvenir market, and the rest go to fossil dealers who sell them to shops and online retailers throughout the world, he said.

“I am very familiar with the fossil black market in Morocco, because I work there, and we have huge problems at our (excavation) sites, where commercial fossil dealers who are black market smugglers come and excavate illegally from our sites, probably from the specimens that we’re digging up,” Maidment said, speaking of those who operated without a proper permit. “Sometimes we find the fossils, and then they take them, and then they sell them on European websites for up to 30,000 euros. So it’s a huge, huge problem.”

Morocco’s Ministry of Energy Transition and Sustainable Development, which regulates “the fields of geology, minerals, hydrocarbons and energies,” has not responded to CNN’s requests for comment.

A ‘gray’ market

The full extent of the questionable movement of fossils across borders is hard to pin down, but it has included important specimens such as Ubirajara jubatus, a feathered dinosaur species first described in a now-retracted 2020 paper from a one-of-a-kind skeleton that had allegedly been illegally exported to Germany from Brazil.

Germany’s State Museum of Natural History Karlsruhe returned the rare remains to Brazil in 2023 among a wave of similar high-profile repatriations, including a 56 million-year-old crocodile fossil that Morocco recovered from the United States. A few years earlier, in 2015, actor Nicolas Cage returned a T. rex skull he bought for $276,000 at auction in 2007 to the Mongolian government.

It’s more difficult for smaller, less expensive fossils that have been illegally exported to make it back to their country of origin, although in 2022 French customs returned nearly 1,000 fossils from the Araripe Basin in Brazil that had been stolen to be sold online.

Neither Martill nor John Nudds, an honorary lecturer in the department of Earth and environmental sciences at the UK’s University of Manchester, would go as far as calling my fossil illegal.

“There’s a bit of a gray area,” Martill said. “I can’t technically go there and dig fossils without the permission of the ministry in Rabat.” But he added that locals “can dig fossils, they can cut fossils, they can polish fossils, and tourists can buy the fossils. And if you go to any fossil fair, you’ll find Moroccan fossils for sale, and that will include Spinosaurus teeth.”

Nudds said he knows of at least one reputable wholesaler based outside Morocco that sells “an awful lot” of Spinosaurus teeth exactly like mine. “That’s why I’m pretty confident that these are OK to come out of Morocco,” he said.

Part of the reason why fossils may occupy a legal gray area, Nudds added, is some ambiguous wording in UNESCO’s 1970 Convention, which was designed to prevent the illegal export of items of cultural importance across many categories. The category that includes fossils is described as “Rare collections and specimens of fauna, flora, minerals and anatomy, and objects of palaeontological interest.”

According to Nudds, the wording makes it unclear whether the objects of paleontological interest are in their own category, which would include all fossils, or if they are part of the “rare collections,” which would not.

But when it comes to my tooth, he said he believes that unless the shop I bought it from has smuggled the item out of Morocco, then it is selling it legally, even if it bought it from a smuggler. “There may be an ethical issue,” Nudds said, “and there may be a moral or even a scientific issue, but not a legal issue.”

Elmahdi Lassale, CEO of M2 Rocks & Minerals, a Moroccan wholesaler and exporter of minerals and fossils that sells directly to retailers in the US, UK and Europe, confirmed that under Moroccan law, since 2020, fossils are classified as geological heritage. Excavating and exporting them isn’t strictly off-limits, according to Lassale, but to do so commercially, a license must be obtained from the Ministry of Energy Transition and Sustainable Development as well as a validated customs certificate.

In practice, it means that before each export, Lassale sends the ministry a list of the individual items he wants to sell. “Normally we just send the descriptions and the names of the items,” he added, “but sometimes they ask to send a real specimen, to see it in person.”

When I asked if he deals in Spinosaurus teeth, he said he doesn’t, because it’s unlikely that the ministry would approve their export. “If we talk about dinosaur bones or teeth, it’s (almost) impossible to export from Morocco (even) with a license,” Lassale said.

Among the items he gets permission to export are trilobites, ammonites, shark teeth, and Mosasaur and Plesiosaur teeth and vertebrae. However, he said he is aware that other fossils do get out of the country via “illegal suppliers” as well as “through informal shipments via tourist luggage and small couriers, creating a mixed online market of documented and undocumented specimens abroad.”

He estimated the total trade of fossils in Morocco to be worth $30 million to $40 million annually, including official and unofficial exports, and that about 80% of fossils are exported. In a large trade show such as the one in Tucson, he said, there will be on average around 200 Moroccan fossil dealers.

Deadly efforts

Martill and Nudds viewed my fossil during separate video calls.

“You’ve got a genuine fossil, but I think it’s a repair,” Martill said. “There’s a possibility that the tip belongs to a different specimen. You can see some glue — they often find broken examples, and they will just do sympathetic repairs.”

However, the human cost of obtaining even an imperfect specimen can be serious, he said. “Let me tell you now that the man who dug that out of the ground risked not only his life but his lungs as well,” Martill said, adding that he has gone into fossil mines in Morocco and spent time with miners.

The fossil trade in Morocco is the main source of income for more than 50,000 people, including diggers, miners, artisans, middlemen and wholesalers who go on to export the fossils, according to a 2018 study.

Martill said he believed my tooth came from Hassi el Begaa, a village in the Kem Kem region.

“This is a place where the mines go in from the side of the hill,” Martill said. “They go in horizontally, for maybe 50 to 100 meters (164 to 328 feet). They then turn to the left or the right, and that’s when you lose any hint of sunlight. You’re well underground, and the place is incredibly dusty. The miners are often working without masks. They have little head torches, and they dig with tiny crowbars fashioned out of the steel that you use to reinforce concrete. They’re not sophisticated tools.

“They do this all day long and then shovel out all of the sand in a wheelbarrow, tip it down the side of the hill and look for the fossils. They’re working extremely hard — they’re hand-digging a mine,” Martill added. Taking all that into account, he said, what I paid for my tooth fossil “is probably pretty cheap.”

Lassale agreed the fossil diggers in Morocco often work in challenging conditions, including temperatures as high as 40 degrees Celsius (104 degrees Fahrenheit), and with minimal protective equipment, while earning about 120 to 180 Moroccan dirhams (about $13 to $20) daily. He added that his company only partners with artisans and cooperatives that provide safety measures such as shade tents, water and protective goggles to workers, though he said such practices are not common industrywide.

“It’s very easy to make a lot of money with this, but it’s not easy to dig out minerals or fossils — small artisans, they put their health at risk” to support their families, Lassale said.

He noted that mines and shafts dug to reach fossil deposits have been known to collapse sometimes, causing fatalities. “Unfortunately, we hear about that every year — not just fossil but also mineral mines,” he said.

To buy or not to buy?

Would I be in trouble if my fossil tooth turned out to be illegal? Experts told me I likely wouldn’t, even if the specimen had been illegally exported — the responsibility would likely be on the wholesaler.

But things could be different for fossils from countries that have strong restrictions on fossil exports. That’s why experts recommend prospective buyers avoid anything advertised from countries such as Brazil, Argentina, China or Mongolia.

“I guess the best advice would be to only buy something if you can see it and hold it in your hand,” Nudds said. “If you’re going to buy online, then maybe avoid those countries which do ban exports, because that’s where you’re more likely to find forgeries.”

Fakes don’t seem to be widespread, but they’re more common on the cheaper end of the market, according to Lovisek of the Fossil Realms gallery in Canada. “There’s so much scrutiny with the higher end, that the real problem is not forgery, but misrepresentation — claiming there’s less restoration than there is, or claiming it’s more real bone than there is,” he said.

Other than such deceptions or distortions, when it comes to how to purchase a fossil properly, experts offered guidance that would apply to buying pretty much anything online: Do your research, look for a reputable seller, and ask for paperwork or proof that the item is sold legally and ethically.

Perhaps the more important question is should you buy a fossil at all?

I still look at the Spinosaurus tooth on my bookshelf and marvel that it’s the oldest thing in my house by at least 94 million years.

But given the complexities around fossils’ cultural status and scientific relevance, the dangerous working conditions in some excavation areas, and the fact that many countries are now recovering fossils exported illegally, it’s no surprise that the answer to that question has stirred disagreement, even within my small cohort of paleontologists.

“Do not buy your fossils online,” said Maidment of London’s Natural History Museum. “Unless you can absolutely verify that they are being sold legally, and that they’re in your country legally, it’s best to just not to do it at all. My view of fossils — it’s something that belongs to all of us. It’s part of our heritage. It shouldn’t be something that one person owns.”

Martill has a different view, particularly for smaller, less rare specimens that don’t hold as much value for researchers. “There are billions of fossils in the ground. There’s no point in them staying in the ground. And scientists like me, there’s only so much that you can do with one isolated dinosaur tooth. It’s a common fossil; it’s scientifically uninteresting,” he said.

“I think it’s great that you can have a fossil. You got something there which is 90 to 100 million years old,” Martill added. “There is a possibility that you could buy a tooth and actually own a piece of the fantastic history of the life on Earth.”

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