00:00 Speaker A
How do you how do you find fossils? How do you know what what fossils to invest in?
00:03 Speaker B
So that that market is absolutely wild. I mean that’s probably the most funky and idiosyncratic piece of the collector’s universe that I’ve dabbled in.
00:13 Speaker A
not like we’re creating more dinosaurs out there, right?
00:15 Speaker B
That’s true. Yeah. So I mean, first of all, it is ridiculous that 60, 70 million years ago these things are walking around.
00:24 Speaker B
And T-Rex in particular was the apex predator on this planet for 100 million years, okay? And it’s just even saying it out loud is it’s hard to quite fathom.
00:36 Speaker A
can’t even fathom it.
00:36 Speaker B
But when you see these fossils up close and in person, and you realize, I mean, T-Rex, there’s a lot of some, there’s some juveniles out there, there’s some fully grown fossils that have been discovered. If you go to the Field Museum in Chicago and you stand in front of Sue, which is the most complete T-Rex ever found, these things are gigantic. They are 40 to 45 feet long. They’re 14, 15, 16 feet tall. Many of these things weighed just north of 20,000 pounds, my dude.
1:04 Speaker A
Can’t even believe it.
1:05 Speaker B
So, you know, you and I, you know, a few hundred pounds each, plus or minus, we’re not really interesting to animals of that size. We’re like rodents. Okay? We would be a topus appetizer for for a T-Rex. okay? And these things were hunting down Triceratops and you know,
1:22 Speaker B
a lot of the those two in particular were in this battle Royale for tens and tens of millions of years and I’ve had the the luxury of going to Wyoming in particular and contacting a bunch of paleontologists and trying to understand how this process works. How do you unearth dinosaur fossils from sediment? And the circulating supply of dinosaurs that have actually been found are quite small. You’re talking dozens of T-Rexes that have been discovered in full since 1902.
1:50 Speaker B
Same thing with Triceratops and Stegosaurus. I mean, people like Ken Griffin, back in 2024, he bought a Stegosaurus named Apex for $44.6 million dollars. Okay?
2:07 Speaker A
Can’t believe I missed that story.
2:08 Speaker B
And that that was the highest price of any dinosaur ever sold. Cassandra Hatton facilitated the sale at Sotheby’s. She’s she’s super savvy, really interesting collector and and and broker at the highest level. And the initial appraised value of that Stegosaurus was a modest 5 to $6 million by experts in paleontology. And yet, that Stegosaurus was so compelling, so complete. You have to understand like when you find a fossil, it’s often you’re finding fragments, right? Like if you pass away, God forbid and 60 million years from now,
2:48 Speaker A
they find my arm.
2:49 Speaker B
And they find your arm, it’s not a fossil. You know, you’re just a bag of bones, right? So most fossils, you start to get into quote-unquote fossil territory when you’re above 25% completion. So you’ve got 206 bones in your body. So if I find 50 to 60 now, okay, we’ve got we’ve got more of a fossil as opposed to a bag of bones and when you click into the fossil market, you start to realize there’s all these nuances. There’s bone count, but there’s also bone volume, and then there’s completion threshold in different pieces, right? Like for a T-Rex,
3:17 Speaker B
well, the most iconic subset of the fossil is the skull, obviously, because you have these crazy teeth that in some cases are 10 to 14 inches in length when you have them next to each other.
3:30 Speaker A
Oh my god. they look so different in a children’s movie.
3:32 Speaker B
They’re bigger than your head. Yeah, bigger than your head. It’s crazy. So, so, you know, a lot of there’s a market for skulls, for instance. There’s skulls that have sold privately for many, many millions of dollars.
3:44 Speaker B
Um, a lot of these fossils, they don’t come up for auction with frequency. The Abu Dhabi government, for instance, bought Stan from Sotheby’s for about $31 million six years ago. So,
3:55 Speaker B
you know, you’re in a that market, my best guess, it’s very high opacity. The total market cap is around $8 billion dollars in terms of circulating supply of fossils that exist.