Dinosaur hunter stumbles upon a million dollar find

The first stegosaurus skeleton to go on the market will fetch millions of dollars in New York. But the extraordinary discovery was made by accident, thousands of kilometers to the west during a 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, the dream is everything, but not for a man named Jason Cooper.

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

In fact, when he goes for a walk around his property in the American Southwest, he’s more likely to run into a creature from prehistoric times.

But even so, he may never come across 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 would rival an old Routemaster double-decker bus – although you’d want to be careful which one you have boarded.

It was a huge stegosaurus, in excellent condition for a beast that had spent the last 150 million years underground.

It is nearly 11.5 feet (3.5 m) tall 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 formidable 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 fantasy of bumping into a dinosaur on your lawn, you can make it happen — if you can get your hands on $4-6 million.

Apex is about to become the first stegosaurus to be auctioned off.

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

This has caused great concern among academic paleontologists, who argue that allowing them to fall into private hands hinders scientific research and deprives the public of a chance to appreciate them.

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

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

He and his family live in Colorado atop a geological feature known as the Morrison Formation, a stretch of sedimentary rock dating back to the Jurassic period that covers 600,000 square miles of the western United States.

The Morrison Formation is to dinosaurs what California was to gold nuggets in the mid-19th century.

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

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

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

“We looked around. My friend found some vertebrae. I was like, “Oh my God, this is turning out to be a really great birthday!”

The rock of clay, mud, and sand where Cooper spotted Apex is like a cross-section of all the deposits that have settled in that part of the world over time.

“I saw protruding tail spikes and several large plates on his back. I could tell it was still rolled up.

After the fossil hunters recorded as much data as possible about where Apex was found, its bones were stuck in protective “collars” made of plaster and burlap and lifted on a trailer.

At Cooper’s Dinosaur Shop, work began on cleaning and reassembling the stegosaurus with equipment including sandblasters, pneumatic chisels and powerful microscopes.

Fossilization meant that the bones were encased in rock; this was painstakingly removed to expose the animal’s skeleton.

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

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

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

Apex didn’t seem damaged in battles with other creatures. The only indication of wear and tear is that its lower vertebrae have fused to the pelvis, the result of arthritis, suggesting that the stegosaurus enjoyed a long life an eternity ago in the earth.

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

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

Steve Brusat, a professor of paleontology and evolution at the University of Edinburgh, who is from the US, says stegosaurus specimens are very rare and, if they are real, belong in a museum.

“It’s a great shame when a fossil like this, which could educate and pique the curiosity of so many people, just 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.

There are no such restrictions in the US, where anyone who digs up a dinosaur on their own property is free to do whatever they want with it, and that includes making a decent living out of it.

Jason Cooper defends the sale of his stegosaurus discovery, arguing that he and his critics are essentially on the same page.

“Collectors and philanthropists who buy these dinosaurs may enjoy them at home for a few years, but then they put the fossils in their name and give them to institutions,” he told the BBC. Cooper says he himself has donated to public collections.

When the sale falls through, Cooper will return to dinosaur land looking for more fossils, some of which he will give away to public collections. Of course, they’re not exactly scarce where it comes from. He compares finding dinosaurs to another childhood dream that sounds almost as improbable. “It’s like looking for gold coins, except you know where the king’s counting house was.”

Stephen Smith is a writer and broadcaster