I have two new Dunkleosteus fossils in my personal collection. It's immensely satisfying, and I thought the journey involved would be of interest to readers.
First, the fossils. I now have a 5-cm maxillary fang tip, with the very tip broken off but still lethal after 380MY, and a lovely, professionally prepped posterior dorsolateral bone.
As a science writer who’s done one article on the species (Prehistoric Times, Summer 2018) and created the Dunkleosteus terrelli Facebook page, I of course have always wanted to own a piece of the real thing,
(BONUS: my posted interview with Engelman on the latest Dunk theories)
got three Dunk fossil pieces, two bits of armor and a chunk of supraorbital bone, off eBay about 2014. They’d come from an Ohio garage sale. There were faded specimen numbers on their plastic bags. I sent photos and numbers to “Dunk Central,” the Cleveland Museum of Natural History, asking if they were anything important and saying I’d donate them if they were. They were not. I’m guessing they were collected on some dig, judged unnecessary, and someone was allowed to take them home. Maybe they were given to a volunteer. In any event, I felt ok keeping them after learning they had no scientific value.
I wanted some pieces from other areas of the skull: not as a
part of a study approach, but to feel like I had a more complete connection to
the animal. I was working hard on a Dunk
novel that would take the standard rediscovered-predator thriller premise and
elevate it with a focus on human drama vs. blood, and one backed by thorough
and accurate research. This became Apex
Predator, which I’ve been shopping in current form for several years
now. I often took bone bits to meetings
with agents.
After the quick eBay find,
I assumed it would be fairly easy to find more. Instead, I learned that
even the major fossil houses rarely offer anything, and when they do it’s
beyond what a middle-class science writer can pay out. I’d love a $3,500 jawbone, but if I showed my
wife the bill, you can guess what the next extinct species would be. There are also many reports of fake Dunkleosteus fossils, and some beautiful fossils from places like some areas of Morocco are tainted by reports of dubiously legal collecting,
I didn’t obsess over it, but I kept an eye out. I posted on
Facebook and other social media that I was looking. I kept checking online
fossils sales merchants, and contacted the ones that didn’t detail their wares
online. I created an eBay alert. I asked paleontologists and writers. I asked dealers at fossil shows that came
through Denver. (It was at one of these a dealer claimed he’d seen an
impression fossil of a small juvenile Dunk but had not been able to afford
it. I’ve never found anyone else who
recalls seeing such a thing, so I assume it must have been a fake or a
misidentification of a smaller placoderm.)
It was the personal contact approach that paid off after
almost a decade. I’d chatted on X with Yinan Wang, “The Fossil Locator,” author of books on state fossils and so
on. I was asking him to take a glance at
the current Apex Predator draft, which he offered to do. I mentioned in passing that I was looking for
more fossils. It turned out he was, in fact, willing to part with two items
from his own collection.
He wrote, "They're both from the Cleveland Shale and collected around the Cleveland region. I don't know the name of the collector but they were in an estate auction back in 2018. Gray Estates LLC." So the exact trail is unknown, but Wang owned them legally.
So I have them now. And I do feel more connected as I run my hands over them. Fossils are the closest thing we can get to time traveling. They take us back.
Matt Bille is a writer, historian, and naturalist living in Colorado Springs. He can be reached at mattsciwriter@protonmail.com. Website: www.mattbilleauthor.com.
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