There's a growing fashion for fossils, but some argue it is undermining scientific research.
“However this rising popularity is concerning scientists: for one thing it is fuelling the illicit trade in fossils.
While some countries like the US, will allow private fossil hunters to sell-on their finds on a "finders keepers" basis, many others including China, Mongolia and Brazil ban the export of all specimens. They're also working to reclaim illegally excavated specimens.
The 70 million-year-old skull of a Tyrannosaurus bataar, an Asian relative to Tyrannosaurus rex, that actor Nicolas Cage bought at auction in the US in 2012, was later reclaimed by the Mongolian government, for example.
Yet the palaeontologist who won that legal battle, Bolortsetseg Minjin, says despite the Mongolian government's determination to stem the flow there are still plenty of new cases of poaching, which she says risk causing irrevocable damage to the specimens.
"Poachers don't have skills and only go for the parts that'll make them money, like destroying whole skeletons just for teeth," she says. "It's treating them like a commodity but these fossils are priceless."
Private buyers might not realise it, she says, but unless they are sure of a fossil's provenance, buying it could indirectly be causing harm by fuelling that black market trade.”
