A dinosaur hunter stumbles upon a million dollar find

The first stegosaurus skeleton to go under the hammer is set to fetch millions of dollars in New York. But the extraordinary discovery happened by accident, thousands of miles to the west during one man’s birthday walk, writes Stephen Smith.

It’s every child’s dream to wander into the garden and come face-to-face with a real dinosaur, ideally one of the less terrifying ones that follow a sensible plant-based diet.

For most of us, that’s just a dream, but not for a man named Jason Cooper.

He encountered dinosaurs in his backyard not once, but on many different occasions.

In fact, when he goes for a walk on his property in the American Southwest, he’s more likely than not to run into a prehistoric creature.

But even so, he may never encounter a specimen like the one he came across a few years ago, an animal so massive that if it appeared on a London street it might measure the size of an old Routemaster double-decker bus. – although you should be careful which one you step into.

It was a huge stegosaurus, in great shape for an animal that had spent the last 150 million years underground.

It is nearly 11.5 feet tall (3.5 m) and a full 27 feet from the top of its head to the tip of its scaly tail.

Mr Cooper named it “Apex” because its imposing size would have made it a dominant animal in its environment.

With the help of a few friends, he cleaned it up and put it back together.

And if you’ve always had the idea of ​​bumping into a dinosaur on your lawn, you can make it happen — if you can put down $4 million to $6 million.

Apex is set to become the first stegosaur to go under the hammer at auction.

Bidding is expected to be brisk. Dinosaur fossils have become coveted trophies coveted by successful tech entrepreneurs and Hollywood stars.

This has caused consternation among academic paleontologists, who argue that allowing them to end up in private hands hinders scientific research and denies the public a chance to appreciate them.

Nicolas Cage reportedly bought the tyrannosaurus skull for more than £185,000 in 2007 after a bidding war with Leonardo DiCaprio, although he returned it after it turned out to be stolen.

Mr. Cooper is a professional fossil hunter who turned a childhood dream of discovering dinosaurs into reality with the pragmatism of a theater buff who decided to rent near Broadway.

He and his family live in Colorado atop a geologic formation known as the Morrison Formation, a stretch of Jurassic sedimentary rock that covers 600,000 square miles in the western United States.

The Morrison Formation is to dinosaurs what California was to gold nuggets in the mid-1800s.

And for the romantically minded, Mr. Cooper and prospectors like him are on America’s last frontier, in the unknown land beneath their own muddy boots.

He owns less than 100 acres and has pulled 10 dinosaurs out of them in the last dozen years. And to hear him tell it, saving his biggest find to date was literally a walk in the park.

It was his 45th birthday and when his friend asked him what he wanted, he said the best present would be a new dinosaur, so off they went. And as they walked up the side of the mountain, Mr. Cooper noticed a femur sticking out of the rock face.

“We looked around. My friend found some vertebrae. I said, ‘Oh my God, this is a really great birthday!’

The reef of clay, mud and sand where Cooper spotted Apex is like a cross-section of all the sediment that has settled in this part of the world over time.

“I saw tail tips sticking out and several large plates on his back. I could tell he was still curled up.”

After the fossil hunters recorded as much data as possible about where the Apex was found, its bones were taped into protective “jackets” made of plaster and burlap and hauled onto a trailer.

Back at Cooper’s dino-shop, work began on cleaning and reassembling the stegosaurus with equipment including sandblasting nozzles, pneumatic chisels and powerful microscopes.

Fossilization meant that the bones were encased in rock; this was carefully removed to reveal the skeleton of the animal.

“Apex is 70% complete, which is incredible for a dinosaur, especially a stegosaurus,” Cooper said.

To put that in context, notions of “completeness” in the fossil world are about as spiky as a stegosaurus’ tail, according to Cassandra Hatton of Sotheby’s, who is overseeing the sale.

“No one has ever found 100% of a dinosaur.” “A stegosaur as good as this one is hard to find,” he says. “I think it’s going to be incredibly important.

Apex didn’t seem to be damaged in fights with other creatures. The only sign of wear and tear was that its lower vertebrae had fused to its pelvis, the result of arthritis, suggesting that the stegosaurus had enjoyed a long life before its eternity in the ground.

It will now be carefully disassembled again, before the long, steady journey overland from Cooper’s to Sotheby’s salesrooms in Manhattan, where the Apex will be reassembled and presented to the public and potential buyers in July.

It’s been 200 years since naturalists began classifying dinosaurs, and their successors are regretting the sale of Apex on that anniversary.

Steve Brusatte, a professor of paleontology and evolution at the University of Edinburgh, originally from the US, says that stegosaurus specimens are very rare and, if they are genuine, belong in a museum.

“It’s a great shame when such a fossil, which could educate and pique the curiosity of so many people, simply disappears into an oligarch’s mansion.”

In the UK, fossil enthusiasts are generally allowed to keep smaller common varieties such as shells and corals, but must report any significant finds.

No such restrictions in the US, where anyone who digs up a dinosaur on their own property has the right to do with it as they please, and that includes making a nice living out of it.

Jason Cooper defends selling the stegosaurus he found, saying he and his critics are basically on the same page.

“Collectors and philanthropists who buy these dinosaurs can enjoy them at home for a few years, but then have the fossils named after them and give them to institutions,” says the BBC. Cooper says he himself contributed to public collections.

When the hammer falls on the sale, Cooper returns to dinosaur land in search of more fossils, some of which he gives away to public collections. Where it comes from, of course, there are quite a few. He compares the search for dinosaurs to another childhood dream that sounds almost as improbable. “It’s like looking for gold coins, except you know where the royal counting house used to be.”

Stephen Smith is a writer and broadcaster