Money Talks: The Dinosaur Economy

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2:39Hello and welcome to Money Talks, which is the part of the Slate Money Extended Universe, where we talk to the most interesting people in the world about the most interesting subjects in the world. I'm Felix Salmon of Bloomberg, and this week I'm talking to Sal Aran. Sal, welcome. Thank you for having me. Lovely to be speaking to you. So introduce yourself. Who are you and what makes you so interesting? I don't know how interesting I am, but happy to introduce myself. Well, I've already listened to the podcast you did with Joe and Tracy over an odd lot. So I know you're interesting. But for those of us who haven't listened to that podcast.

3:19Okay, well, a bit about me. So I work in a gallery called David Aaron. We are a fourth generation gallery that specializes in antiquities, Islamic art and dinosaur fossils. It's managed by myself, my two brothers and my dad. and over the past 15 years we've pivoted to natural history to amazing american dinosaur fossils which i think is the kind of subject of our conversation today i definitely want to discuss this whole idea of it belongs in a museum which is one of the so many things i want to talk to you about we are going to be talking about dinosaurs and collecting dinosaurs and paying for dinosaurs and the economics of dinosaurs and it's not just about hollywood movies anymore it's mostly, well, in terms of what we're going to be talking about, it's about fossils.

4:06And I'm going to start before I get into any of that, because it's something which has been kind of in the back of my head. I'm sure I knew this when I was 11, but I have long since forgotten. What exactly is a fossil? So for all intents and purposes, in our case, we're talking about bones, which made up the complete skeletons of these dinosaurs that are fossilized and under the ground waiting to be discovered and traded in. So a bone is like, if I get buried in the ground, will I eventually become a fossil? What is the process of fossilization? I actually couldn't tell you how, when and how it's applied.

4:44And I should actually know. But in our case, for intents and purposes, we describe dinosaur bones as fossils. So I probably should know the answer to this question. I feel like in 100 million years, a fossilized felix could be worth something, but almost certainly won't exist. It could be. But there were millions of dinosaurs roaming the Earth many millions of years ago, and some unknown proportion of them became fossils. And then some unknown proportion of those fossils were discovered. And over the past couple of hundred years, paleontologists have been examining those fossils because they are the main way that we learn about dinosaurs.

5:23Am I basically correct so far? Yes, the fossils, also the kind of surrounding areas or the excavation sites. And there's also information that people lean in from the rocks and set the formations. But yeah, most of what we understand comes from the fossilized bones. And then in the past, just like this century, really, just in the past sort of 15, 20 years, something interesting has happened. And you kind of flicked it when you said that your gallery that has historically specialized in antiquities and Islamic art has suddenly pivoted to fossils, which is that there is a market here now. So tell me about that decision.

6:05Like, here you are in London, having a perfectly decent fourth-generation existence of dealing with antiquities and Islamic art, which is well-known things, and then suddenly one morning you wake up and you're like, I think we should be dealing in triceratops? It's a long answer. Our market has obviously changed over time and become more regulated with much greater requirements for due diligence. And as a gallery, we've set a very high bar for what we are prepared to deal in, both in terms of quality and also in terms of provenance. So how do you know when you buy an Egyptian sarcophagus or a Roman marble statue of Alexander, how do you know that what you're buying was illegally sourced?

6:48How do you know it left its country of origin legally? And because we apply such high standards to kind of the process of understanding and uncovering the provenance chronology as far back as we can, there is a shrinking number of objects in which we can deal. For that reason, we decided as a gallery, we needed to not only deal in antiquities, but explore other art categories or ideas that we wanted to deal with. And ever since, and I'm sure a lot of people can resonate, since I was a young boy, I've loved dinosaur fossils. I've loved dinosaurs. I've constantly visited the Natural History Museum.

7:21And we just thought, why don't we explore this field? And actually, there was a lot of synergy between what we were doing and the dinosaur fossil market, because it's like antiquities or Islamic art. You're dealing in objects which require due diligence. and we feel we felt we could do that in a much better way than was the industry standard at the time. And also you need to understand conservation, aesthetics, rarity, research, etc. And we looked at the dinosaur fossil market and thought, okay, this is a very unregulated market in its infancy. Most people don't know you can buy dinosaur fossils or the legalities surrounding them.

7:58the industry itself presents information in a very incomplete, incoherent, in some ways misleading manner for private buyers, which we can go into. And there was also this massive disconnect. So first of all, like, what is this industry whereof you speak? I mean, so like whenever I read an article about the dinosaur market, the person who seems to be quoted the most is you, like is it who is who makes up the dinosaur industry? To give you an overview of the market, you have landowners who could be dinosaur explorers who are dealers or excavators that acquire the land themselves, hoping to find dinosaur bones.

8:38You have just general landowners who might just be their personal property or they might have their own ranch selling cattle, which is often the case, who then interact with dinosaur hunters who will approach them and say, look, we know that where your property is based is a great hotbed of dinosaur fossils from the Jurassic era or from the Cretaceous era. Can we enter into a lease agreement where whatever we find is split or shared or sold together? And you also have intermediaries who may not excavate themselves, but may acquire fossils as they are discovered and then trade them. You have preparatory labs, which will focus or specialize in taking those bones and then mounting the specimens.

9:21So filling in missing parts through 3D printing, toning in missing bones made out of resin, trying to do that in a scientifically anatomically correct way. then you have auction houses and you have private buyers and museums and the scientific community so that's kind of an overview of the market okay so this is a large market and would it be fair to say that it has grown significantly over the past 10-15 years yes it's unrecognizable so when i started overwhelmingly the only question i got asked was is this real is this really for sale nobody really believed it. Our gallery was the first to actually exhibit dinosaur fossils in an art market context, an art fair.

10:05And we spent the whole fair just explaining to people we were actually showing a real 66 million years old triceratops. Nobody could actually get their head around it. So the first five to 10 years of dealing was just trying to explain the market, its existence, how it worked. And after a series of very high profile sales, especially by auction houses, now people, everyone understands most people understand that there is an amazing rapidly growing exciting market for dinosaur fossils that is still very much in its infancy and this is this is like the great irony really that these things that have literally been around for a hundred and a hundred million years are actually like kind of a brand new market is kind of appeared out of nowhere and and i think one of the things that a lot of people don't understand i just wanted to sort of like get feel when we see the big headlines of dinosaurs being sold at Sotheby's for 40 million dollars or whatever being sold to Ken Griffin often in fact usually those are what I would think of as primary market dinosaurs right those dinosaurs just a couple years ago were in the ground these aren't Victorian dinosaurs that were dug up in the 1880s and are now being resold yes and it's a really interesting point.

11:24And the question is why? And there are several reasons. The first reason is dinosaurs discovered 15 years ago, 20 years ago, often did not have all of the provenance information attached to the discovery. So if I had a full argument, say a T-Rex skull in my living room and I've owned it 20 years, but if I can't prove on what property, what the GPS coordinates, what was the arrangement, what were the land deeds, who owned it at the time, how was it transported if i can't show all of that to a prospective buyer why should anyone part with millions of dollars to buy something you don't know was discovered on private property or in on public land and then it belongs to the u.s state that's reason number one so basically the risk is if i'm if i'm a collector of dinosaurs i just don't want to take the risk that someone is going to come along and say oi that's my t-rex skull i want it back yes and that's that's point one.

12:21But there are several other reasons. So the other reason is there's a massive, massive, overwhelming shortage of supply for great dinosaur fossils. When you have an amazing dinosaur fossil offered for sale, you usually have, and if it is, if it checks out the provenance, the condition, the quality is as described, you usually have a queue of people wanting to buy it, which is why it's so competitive. Thirdly, the high prices are encouraging people to sell things. So, you know, some of the very high profile dinosaur fossils sold at auction have been in collections where the owner may have bought the specimen five years ago or eight years ago or two years ago.

12:59And it has now decided because of the interest and the kind of massive price rises to sell it, which is another reason. The next reason is that Sotheby's and Christie's or private collectors often like to buy things as they're discovered or offered these things because you have complete overview over the process of the prepping. If I approach you and say, okay, I have a T-Rex, we're going to just use this T-Rex skull as our example moving forward. If you have a T-Rex skull for sale and I've owned it for 20 years, I mean, I would like to see the images of it as it was discovered to show that, prove to me that all the parts are original to this specimen, but this is in the composite of different T-Rexes.

13:35Prove to me that they're all from the same site. And so most of what I sell are items I acquire directly from landowners or from dealers in kind of coordination with landowners because I want myself to be able to oversee that entire process on behalf of the buyer. And obviously the rising price of dinosaurs plays a crucial role in this and I love this the way that the market creates the supply. If a T-Rex skull is worth millions of dollars then at that point there is much more incentive for dinosaur hunters to go out into the wilds of Idaho or wherever and find T-Rex skulls. That incentive just didn't exist 20 years ago, and therefore it didn't happen 20 years ago.

14:19Definitely. There's definitely more excavation today because of the higher prices, but there is also massive barriers to entry. So for example, first, you need to be experienced at excavation. It's not like you just walk onto a field and start looking for teeth. You may find something, but a lot of these dinosaur hunters find these great things. I mean, sometimes they're multi-generational. They've been looking or honing in their skills for 20, 30, 40 years. They've identified key sites that are not overly excavated, et cetera. Then also, it's a very hard line of work. It's backbreaking. I mean, whenever I visit a site, you feel kind of overwhelming respect for the people who kind of are very passionate about what they do, that will go out season after season, only able to excavate in particular temperatures where it's not too cold, ideally not too hot, and it's very physical, sometimes a lot of personal injury.

15:15I know several dinosaur dealers that have kind of injured themselves badly on excavation sites, so it's not something where you can easily ramp up the supply. And further to that, by the way, it's very risky, because if you are a dinosaur dealer looking for your next T-Rex skull, for example, and you go out and you excavate for a season and you come back with nothing, you also need to have the kind of financial backing to be able to go back in again and keep looking and not give up and is that what is that what you provide as a dealer do you provide that kind of surety to make sure that people can still be out exploring and taking those risks yes so so what we will do is and obviously each case is case by case is that we will partner with dealers or landowners we will forward pay we will pay as soon as something's been discovered so So often we're taking positions, hoping that more bones are discovered or hoping that as things are actually excavated entirely, that they are not in worse condition than expected.

16:15So you have to do all of those things in order to get great dinosaur fossils because it's so competitive. If we didn't do any of that, we'd have nothing to sell and you wouldn't be speaking to me. I'm so like my brain, I'm having so much difficulty holding two ideas in my head at the same time because i spend a lot of time thinking about the fine art market i have this idea that you know you have the primary market which is artists who are creating work and selling it directly through galleries and then you have the secondary market in something like islamic art that you you know that you deal in where stuff has been around for centuries and people read it back and forth and have a level of connoisseurship about it and it's old and what we have here is this combination of things which are so much older than anything in islamic altar antiquities but at the same time in every other respect is brand new is primary yes and i'm you know like there is an obvious similarity between dinosaurs and antiquities and that both of them are things that sort of get dug up on digs but there's i mean correct me if i'm wrong but there's basically nowhere in the ancient world where you can go on a dig and get permission from the land owner and dig up an antiquity and say, great, that's mine now and sell it in the London art gallery.

17:33Whereas in the case of fossils, that's broadly true most of the world, but there is this one massive exception, which is the United States. And so thanks to the laissez-faire capitalism of the United States, like American fossils are basically the entire dinosaur market, right? Correct. You actually summarized it perfectly. I'd add that as an antiquities dealer or Islamic art dealer. It's fascinating because, as you said, it's like being in the antiquity space, but excavations in the US are perfectly legal. And you have this amazing opportunity because of our experience in antiquities to say, okay, this is the Wild West within the US.

18:12In legal terms, it's a legal title, but we can actually apply the rules and regulations that we imagine at some stage will actually come into effect. So for example, we basically, when we sell dinosaur or fossils. And I know that Sotheby's and Christie's also take exceptional care to kind of present all of the information to their buyers. But we've actually curated our own methodology for dealing in the space, what we need in terms of provenance, what we need in terms of conservation, how we actually reflect the completeness of a dinosaur. Because at the moment, if you walk into a dinosaur dealer's shop or office or whatever, and you say, okay, I'd like to buy your T-Rex skull, he'll present you with a bone map.

18:49And he will say, okay, I have out of X number of bones, I have X. So that renders this 60 % complete, making it an amazing example of a T-Rex skull. And then what you don't do is you don't actually delve deeper and say, okay, well, it's 60 % complete. What does that mean? Oh, it means that there are 60 % numerically, 60%. How many bones are there in a T-Rex skull, by the way? I think it varies. A T-Rex skeleton is normally 300 and something bones, around that. And the skulls have like teeth and... Yes, but what are you counting as a bone? Are you counting a tiny tooth or are you counting a claw?

19:24Are you counting a massive limb? Are you counting a rib? You know, and all of these things are different in terms of rarity, in terms of scientific importance, in terms of commercial value. And so we understood that there was actually a massive disconnect between the way completeness was being presented and how complete the actual specimen was. So yeah, you could like, if I took a thigh bone and snapped it in half and then like recreated the other half of each thigh bone, then suddenly I'd have two thigh bones. Exactly. And you have this intuition that a fully intact thigh bone should be worth more than two half thigh bones rather than being worth less than two half thigh bones, which I agree with.

20:08Um, and I'm sorry. And is that an intuition that is shared by Christie's and Sotheby's? Are you kind of more, all more or less on the same page here? To an extent, yes, but that's still not the standard. So that's why I tell clients who visit us, you know, our issue is when, when a client wants to buy something, we tell them, well, what we have to do is develop a relationship. We have to earn your trust and we need to be patient because if you want to buy something off the shelf, then we don't really have oversight over the whole process. So the best way to do it normally is to kind of understand the market, learn how it works, identify what you like, and then be ready for your dinosaur fossil to become available and kind of acquire it instantly, even before it's prepped, even sometimes as their bones still in the ground, and then wait for it to be ready.

20:57And we do that more often than not. And that is how you can compete with Ken Griffin, because have you ever successfully bid on behalf of a client at auction for a fossil, for a dinosaur? I have, not for$45 million, but I have on many occasions. Yeah, but you see, we have to be able to get the Ken Griffin specimens. We have to be able to acquire them early and quickly as they're discovered so that we're not talking about a stegosaurus by the time it's on the Sotheby's homepage and all of the kind of iconic tech billionaires and major museums know about it. So it strikes me that when I am digging up antiquities or dealing in Islamic art, what I am doing is I'm finding and valuing important and beautiful record of human civilization and the way that human creativity was expressed thousands of years ago, or maybe hundreds of years ago.

21:56And there is a real sense in which the most valuable such pieces are the most beautiful such pieces, that you are rewarding the original creator of those pieces, even if you don't know exactly who that person was. And that's not the case with dinosaurs, right? I mean, you talked quite eloquently about the enormous amount of expert and physically dangerous work that goes into excavating these fossils. it's there's certainly a lot of human input into bringing these dinosaurs to market but ultimately the thing that we're buying is the thing it's the thing that was sitting in the ground for 100 million years and in a weird way like as you're saying like the less added extra human stuff that we add to it in order to like fill in the gaps and recreate missing bones out of resin or whatever, the better.

22:52And it's really the sort of absence of humanity that we're valuing here. And that, I can't think of anything else that you could buy in an art gallery or an auction house where you're not rewarding some kind of human creativity. Yeah, I mean, I imagine you can acquire stones in the natural history space, slabs of lapis lazuli or gogots, which are, we sell gogots sculptures, which are these incredible sand sculptures that are formed completely on their own and discovered mostly in France, in an area slightly outside of Paris, which people always are confused by the fact that they're actually naturally formed without human interaction.

23:31But in general, you're right. Where you may, where I would kind of counter the point would just be to say that a premium needs to be attached to a dinosaur fossil, which is prepped scientifically and anatomically and beautifully. So for instance, when you're prepping a bone and you're removing the earth or the dirt, et cetera, you need to do that delicately. You need to do that sensitively. That's why a lot of people in that field are actually from the dentistry industry because they're kind of just as they kind of clean teeth, they're cleaning bones. They are literally cleaning teeth. Yeah, yeah.

24:04So exactly. So, and, or for instance, we try to distinguish ourselves by just trying to avoid damaging patina or surface. But you're absolutely right. You are buying a piece of humanity's collective history. And it's about the fossil. It's about the bones. You set up at the top that you deal and you work a lot with museums. Why do museums want these things? There is this kind of narrative that you sometimes stumble across in this world of dinosaur fossils that some people bemoan the interest of tech billionaires in buying dinosaurs because they belong in the museum they have some kind of like scientific or paleological value is that still true like when we dig up a dinosaur today are we really learning something new about dinosaurs that we didn't know before so i think it's a nuanced point because in some cases we're learning a lot.

25:02In some cases, we're learning very little, if anything. But the point is, in my opinion, and I do have a vested interest on the balance, I think everyone is better off with a regulated private trade that obviously creates problems where some specimens that would really be great in the public space are lost to private collections. But on the balance, Most private collectors I work with always want to make their fossils available to science, want to work with museums, want in some cases to donate to museums. A lot of the specimens that we deal in would never ordinarily be discovered, may be damaged or lost as a result of weather, construction, urbanization, etc.

25:47And I give the case study of an amazing dinosaur fossil we sold last year, which was acquired by the Natural History Museum in the UK. a completely new species. The Natural History Museum called it the Enigma Cursor, 150 million years old, a herbivore, which was circa 1 meter 50 in length, super rare. And when we acquired this piece, we showed it to the Natural History Museum. We said, look, what do you think? Do you like the piece? What are your thoughts on it? They said, oh, it's amazing. We don't have anything like it. We'd love to have it in the museum. We don't have the funds to acquire at this point.

26:19Well, I said, well, okay, let me put it on unconditional reserve for you. And let me see if I can find a private donor to acquire it on behalf of the museum, which is what I did. We exhibited it at Friese as sold or reserved. And the only conversations we had about this piece was to try to find someone to acquire it directly, permanently gifted to the museum, which we did. We convinced an antiquity collector to acquire it on behalf of the museum, which is where it is now, and also to acquire it with a very generous research grant to study the piece. So that's an example and i know that's not always possible but that's an example of where the private trade has interacted with the scientific community and we've managed to kind of develop a symbiotic relationship where everyone went we need to jump to a quick ad break but when we come back we will talk about how you value dinosaurs versus picassos

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30:03Talk to me about the incentives there. Here in the US, everyone immediately goes to some kind of charitable tax deduction. I don't know if that's the case in the UK. But if I'm walking down the aisles at Fries and I see a dinosaur and you're like, oh, this is lovely, I'll sell it to you, but please just don't take it home. Give it to the Natural History Museum. I'm sure I'm a fan of the Natural History Museum and I would love them to have it. but is that literally just it? No. Firstly, for full disclosure, that very rarely happens. And secondly, I don't think there's, there's not really any significant benefits to gifting in the UK, unlike in the US.

30:42And this particular buyer didn't really have any tax benefit, as far as I'm aware, to making the donation. But there are also dinosaur fossils, which are, let's use the example of a triceratops skull. It's this iconic, world-famous, universally appreciated, in my opinion, immensely undervalued dinosaur fossil. And the Triceratops was kind of the, well, it's the iconic herbivore from the Cretaceous era. It's 66 million years old. Everyone knows it from its two large horns. And that is something which, despite its immense value to private people and also to museums, it's relatively common in museums.

31:20So if you have a Triceratops skull, there are a lot of museums that will have examples or multiple examples of Triceratops skulls. And I see, very rarely is there significant information to learn from having another one. Once you already have like four Rothkos, you don't need a fifth, right? Exactly. Unless, for example, some paleontologists will argue, okay, well, we would like to know information about the actual search location. Maybe there's more circumstantial evidence or information to learn from that particular triceratops skull. But in my career, I rarely met a paleontologist who has felt they've learned something new from another triceratops skull offered for sale.

31:56So what that does is it basically frees up collectors to be like, hey, I have a triceratops skull in my living room, which is kind of cool. And you're saying that it's undervalued. I'm assuming that's sort of on the one hand relative to other maybe carnivorous dinosaurs. And on the other hand, relative to other sort of instantly recognizable pieces of fine art like you would would you compare? I know that Sotheby's and Christie's do this all the time. They'll throw a dinosaur into an auction with a Klimt. And they're like, it does the same job of impressing the people who walk into your living room.

32:35And so, like, shouldn't it be similarly valued? Or not similarly, worth 5%. And that's the point. Well, what's the going rate of a triceratops skull these days? Let's say, for a good one, half a million to a million dollars. Much less than 5 % of Augusta have glimmed. Yeah. Yes. And when we exhibit a triceratopsis car for sale, we are inundated with people who come up, they're excited, they go back home, they bring their kids the next day to the art fair, they tell their friends. We always have a small group asking questions. We're constantly fielding questions from people of all ages and all backgrounds.

33:15And you think, well, this is so much more inspiring. The general population, I believe, would kind of always say this should have much more value than a second rate. I'm not saying Clint is the right example, but I'm saying a second rate or a third rate fine art or modern art or contemporary artists. And then also when you imagine, and I know a lot of these, some of these artworks, contemporary artworks, obviously require painstaking effort. But when you understand the process that, you know, you're buying something that maybe someone spent 10 years looking for, 20 years, maybe this is the crowning discovery in their career.

33:47They've toiled over it for two seasons. They've excavated it. It's gone to a prepping lab. Then it's been another nine months to 18 months of painstaking preparation. It's then been a plinth has been made. It's been imported. It's research has been shown to paleontologists. Conservatives have come. They've checked it. You know, you've created a real presentation on what you've discovered. It's scientific interest. It's value. It's all of those things. And you think, okay, all of that work years. and there are auctions. You see where I'm going with this. Yeah, exactly. Why would you not prefer this to a third-rate Picasso?

34:23Seriously. That's my view. But I'm fascinated in that case. I'm very, very open to this idea that the potential universe of dinosaur lovers and dinosaur collectors is significantly larger than the potential universe of contemporary art lovers and contemporary art collectors. Like contemporary art, there are those of us who very much like it, who get into it, who develop a connoisseurship around it. You know, and if you listen to past episodes of Slate Money, you will hear me going on and on about why that banana was actually a really good work of art and it's worth every penny that it was paid for.

35:00But most people aren't on that page. And they find it befuddling. Whereas I think, as you say, intuitively everyone kind of understands what a dinosaur is. We all grew up with Jurassic Park. Who didn't grow up with dinosaurs? Baby dinosaurs were in Fantasia in 1932 or whenever that came out. So given the much, much broader potential universe of potential buyers of these things compared to the art market, how is it that you are exhibiting these things in art fairs where you're kind of, by definition, limiting your audience to the kind of people who are interested in art? And then similarly with the auction houses, mostly they just deal with people who like art.

35:43and you find these dinosaurs being auctioned alongside artworks. And the kind of people who buy them, like Ken Griffin or whoever, is famously a huge art buyer. And I'm sure there are lots of big art buyers who like dinosaurs, but I'm equally sure there are lots of people who would never care about buying art who would like dinosaurs. And how do you reach those people? You're absolutely right. We are scratching the surface of the dinosaur fossil market. despite the massive price increases we're still at the beginning and most of the people that we'll discuss you're saying well how do we reach them well art fairs we use every platform we can online etc but a lot of the time i'm selling to people who will say i bought this i think i'm the only person in my country that knows that i can acquire an american dinosaur fossil legally several times we've sold dinosaurs to countries where people say i i bought it but nobody in this country i think knows that actually American dinosaur fossils are for sale.

36:42So I think the word's getting out there with these high-profile auction sales, but as you touch upon, it's still the beginning. I mean, currently the market record for a T-Rex is$30 billion. I mean, why isn't it$150 million? If it's the best T-Rex skeleton for sale, why is it not$250 million? Now, you might say, well, I can keep excavating them. Well, some of these T-Rex skeletons that are for sale have been known for decades, or kind of our understanding of how complete the T-Rex skeleton can be has been known for decades. And it's really hard to find another T-Rex skeleton. It takes years. And everybody has known since the early 2000s that they're worth many millions.

37:24Early 2000s, Sue sold for$8.3 million, which is an amazing T-Rex skeleton in Chicago. But that sale did not create and end the stream of T-Rexes. So that's why I think we don't know yet what this market will look like in 20 years' time. You know, maybe a T-Rex will be more, a great T-Rex will be worth more than the very best Picasso. It's not impossible. And the very best Picasso, just for those listeners who don't know, I mean, the Picasso auction record, I think is, what, 140 million, something like that, there or thereabouts. And that's, frankly, not the very best Picasso. That was a kind of, what I would call a fair to middling Picasso.

38:02like a really genuinely great Picasso would go for significantly more than that. So yeah, you could easily imagine if T-Rexes started being valued. And to be clear, there are probably more Picassos in the world than there are T-Rexes. I mean, almost certainly. Definitely. Picasso was a very prodigally fecond artist. And so, yeah. And so you can see the logic there, definitely. But I come back also to this idea that with Picasso, we are rewarding genius. And with fossils, we're just rewarding scarcity. It's not really the same thing. It's not the same thing, but this is a philosophical question about how we attribute value.

38:45I would argue value is determined by desirability. And I think the desirability can be calculated in many ways. Which has more views on, more searches on Google? which would command a greater audience in a museum, which creates cues of people, which inspires the next generation of scientists, which has retained its intellectual and scientific interest for longer, which do you believe will be more valuable in 100 years when we all live in the mass? So I don't know how to spin it. I just know that I love dinosaur fossils. I love dealing in them. I consider it a privilege. I'm still learning. I've still not been in this space anywhere near as long as my colleagues or have as much knowledge as some of the great, obviously, some of the great paleontologists.

39:36But I think it's underappreciated, it's undervalued, and I think when done in the proper way, it represents an amazing opportunity to anyone who's interested. On which note, Salman Aron, thank you so much for coming on Money Talks. This has been absolutely fascinating, and I have learned a ton. And you are most generous with your time to come on and explain it all to us. Thank you very much. Likewise. Thank you for having me on and speaking to me. Thanks to Sal for coming on. Thanks to all of you guys for listening. We are, as ever, constantly reading your emails on SlateMoneyAtSlate.com. And thanks especially to Jessamine Molly for producing.

40:16We will be back on Saturday with a regular Slate Money.

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