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December 2, 1995
Web posted at: 5:50 a.m. EST
From Correspondent Brian Jerkins
NEW YORK (CNN) -- How would you like to get your paws on the best cave bear skeleton ever mounted, a six-foot Ice Age specimen found in Romania, appraised at $40,000.?
Perhaps you'd rather splurge on the world's biggest gem-quality polished opal, plucked from a mine in Brazil and pegged at $400,000.
Or how about a nest of fossilized dinosaur eggs from China for only $10,000 to $14,000. Or a pair for $2,000?
Thanks to former gem dealer David Herskowitz, they'll all be
on the auction block this weekend at Phillips Auction house
in New York.
Herskowitz' fascination with fossils began with amber, like a piece in which a trapped gnat instinctively released her eggs. Its selling price is just $1,000.
Armed with bargains like that, Herskowitz sold the venerable Phillips Auction house on holding a sale of nature's artwork.
The first-ever auction of natural history objects held at
Phillips last June brought in just under a half million
dollars. The second auction this weekend is expected to make
twice as much.
A moon rock stowed away by an Apollo astronaut could bring astronomical bids.
But a bit of a Martian meteorite that simply dropped on
Nigeria 33 years ago is expected to fetch only about $2,000.
The top estimate of $1.2 million is for a 10-foot-tall reconstructed jaw of an ancient shark believed to have been 70 feet long. The gums are fiberglass, but the 184 teeth are real. The longest is 7 and five-eighths inches.
Former jeweler Vito Bertucci spent 20 years digging in a Carolina river before he found enough big, unchipped teeth to make his model. He's got the muscles and scars to prove it.
"I've been attacked by sharks, attacked by turtles, hit by a boat, you name it," he said.
And Bertucci believes he has a right to profit from his
labor.
While no one is knocking the auction, museums are concerned that selling fossils -- especially dinosaur bones -- could endanger scientific study down the line.
"When fossils become attractive like this in purely commercial terms, there is a chance for not only the lack of access to the fossil by scientists or museums, but also the loss of data," said Michael Novak of the American Museum of Natural History. (170K AIFF sound or 170K WAV sound)
But the consultant who cleared the items for auction says none of the items on sale are critical to science.
"I'm not concerned about the pricing of these things, simply because if you don't put a value on it, it's worth nothing," said fossil merchant Henry Galiano.
Mike Hammer agrees. He discovered a small two-footed dinosaur in South Dakota with the skull and even a heart muscle perfectly preserved. Not a single museum wants it.
He's convinced private buyers do better at getting fossils on public display. "I'll bet you two or three of the items in the Phillips auction will wind up in museums within five months," he said.
But many of the objects will stay on collector's coffee tables. After all, it's tough to picture dinosaur droppings, at $200 a plate, publicly displayed with the donor's name on a plaque beside them.
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