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Dinos for Sale
MAY 2005
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On our first night in Siberia we were in a tundra camp and went to have dinner with the people who ran the place. We stayed up late eating, drinking, and endlessly toasting each other and then finally broke up at about 1 or 2 a.m. When we walked outside I expected it to be dark, but it wasn't dark at all because of the aurora borealis. It was the most beautiful and stunning thing I had ever seen in nature, and I lay on the soft, spongy tundra for an hour and watched it. It was as though someone had taken a huge bucket of milk and splashed it across the heavens.
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In Morocco I saw men digging 20 to 30 feet (6 to 9 meters) into the ground by hand, looking for small fossils. Then they got down on their bellies in the dark and started digging these ten-foot (three-meter) tunnels off to the side. But they didn't have anything propped up to help support the tunnels, which was terrifying because they occasionally collapse. I interviewed the widow of a man who was killed this way. It was depressing to realize that these people are so poor that they will risk their lives for a few dollars a week.
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I met a commercial fossil dealer named Fyodor Shidlovskiy, a larger than life figure with a very winning personality. He went through the Soviet education system as an airplane engine technician and began to feel trapped until he went on a camping trip with his friend. This friend pointed out some mammoth bones lying around on the ground to him, and suddenly Fyodor found his passion. Now he makes a good living traveling around the world selling these fossils to private collectors. The scientific communities in the United States and Russia view what he's doing as wrong, but at the same time Fyodor is helping get these fossils out to bigger audiences.
While there are definitely some yahoos in the business, there are those like Fyodor who are also interested in the science. He would probably like nothing more than to work alongside a scientist or see a piece of his in a legitimate museum.
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