What do land mines and tuberculosis have in common? Both kill people in developing countries — and both can be sniffed out by rodents that grow up to 3 feet, head to tail.

Since 2000, the international nonprofit APOPO has partnered with Tanzania’s Sokoine University of Agriculture to train African giant pouched rats (Cricetomys ansorgei) to pick up the scent of TNT in land mines. By 2016, the animals had located almost 20,000 land mines in Africa and Southeast Asia.
To help more people, Georgies Mgode, a zoonotic disease scientist at Sokoine, and colleagues began training the rats to recognize tuberculosis, an infectious disease that killed about 1.6 million people in 2016. The most common diagnostic tool — inspection of patients’ sputum under a microscope — can miss infections more than half the time. More accurate technologies are costly or still in testing (SN Online: 2/28/18).
“Every disease, anything organic, has a smell,” says Mgode. Mycobacterium tuberculosis
, the bacterium that causes TB, emits 13 volatile chemicals that set it apart from other microbes, he and colleagues reported in 2012. Training a rat to be a TB sniffer, recognizing those smells in phlegm, takes about nine months.
To start, trainers bond with 4-week-old rats, naming the pups, playing with them and hand-feeding them. During training, the rats get a food reward when they pause at infected samples. Most trained rats can work through 100 samples in less than 20 minutes, faster than other methods, Mgode says.

Still, convincing others to accept the rats as a diagnostic tool has been a challenge. On April 4 in Pediatric Research, Mgode and colleagues made their latest pitch, based on over 55,000 sputum samples from Tanzanian clinics examined by trained rats between 2011 and 2015. Microscopy detected TB in 8,351 samples. The rats detected those, plus 2,745 more, later verified by standard methods. The animals did especially well on samples from young kids, who often cough up less phlegm for testing and have low bacterial counts.

Today, as part of the continuing research project, the rats screen TB samples from Tanzania and Mozambique, and soon Ethiopia. But the rats have yet to receive global approval from the World Health Organization.

“We are working very hard according to good lab practices, we have well-documented protocols and we are abiding by endorsed techniques,” Mgode says. “People [with TB infection] who are being missed in the hospitals are being confirmed by the rats.”

Editor’s note: This article was updated on May 16, 2018, to clarify that the TB-sniffing rat program is an ongoing research project.

Psychologists generally regard preschoolers as supreme copycats. Those little bundles of energy will imitate whatever an adult does to remove a prize from a box, including irrelevant and just plain silly stuff. If an experimenter pats a container twice before lifting a latch to open it, so will most kids who watched the demonstration.

There’s an official scientific name for mega-mimicry of this sort: overimitation. Maybe copying everything helps youngsters learn rituals and other cultural quirks. Maybe kids imitate to excess so that an adult who appears to possess special knowledge will like them.
Or maybe overimitation is overrated. In realistic learning situations — where children can gauge whether a majority of adults are patting a box or otherwise going off course before getting down to business — copycat fever cools off dramatically.

That’s the conclusion of a team led by psychologist Cara Evans of the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History in Jena, Germany. “The term ‘overimitation’ misleadingly suggests that children mindlessly and inefficiently copy irrelevant actions,” Evans says. “Instead, children imitate adults in highly flexible, selective and adaptive ways.”

The researchers tested 252 British children, ages 4 to 6, who were visiting science centers with their parents. Of those, 201 kids watched a video showing four adults consecutively demonstrate how to remove a capsule containing a sticker from a clear plastic box. Either all, 3 of 4, 1 of 4, or none of the demonstrators performed an irrelevant action — sliding open a small door in the box to reveal an empty space — before using one of two levers to move the capsule in front of the door. The other 51 kids saw no demonstrations.

Each child then had a chance to get a sticker, previously chosen as his or her favorite, out of the box. Those who succeeded got two more tries at extracting new stickers.
In line with past overimitation studies, nearly all kids who saw all four adults demonstrate the superfluous door-opening routine copied that behavior on all trials. But only about 40 percent of those who saw three of four adults open the door to nowhere did the same on their first try. That percentage dropped by nearly half on second and third go-rounds with the box. All it took was one adult demonstrating a better prize-releasing technique to elicit that behavior in kids. The results will be published later this year in Developmental Science.

As with children who saw no demonstrations, the kids who saw the irrelevant door-opening performed by only one adult rarely imitated the action.

In short, preschoolers did not blindly follow the crowd, Evans says. If only one out of four adults showed how to extract a prize efficiently, then the kids were alright with that and copied the outlier. Evans suspects that children copied unanimous demonstrations of a useless procedure because they figured “this is the way it is done,” even if the extra step seemed unnecessary.

Evans sees a connection between her findings and the results of social psychologist Solomon Asch’s famous conformity experiments from the 1950s. Ash observed that individual college students went along with groups of peers who, in league with Asch, unanimously said that lines of different lengths were actually the same length. But volunteers resisted peer pressure if just one other person, at Asch’s direction, dissented from the crowd.

When it comes to deciding whom to imitate and whom to ignore, kids and adults can be equally discriminating.

KOCHI, India — The rare and deadly Nipah virus has emerged in southern India, killing at least 11 people and causing more than 25 others to be hospitalized. Although global health officials consider that, so far, to be a relatively small outbreak, they’re worried.

Nipah is on the World Health Organization’s priority list of emerging diseases that could cause a global pandemic, alongside Zika and Ebola.

“This is the first time we’ve seen the virus in south India,” says R.L. Sarita, the director of health services in the Indian state of Kerala. “And we want to make sure that it stays contained here.”
Those infected suffer a quick onset of symptoms, including fever, vomiting, disorientation, mental confusion, encephalitis and — in up to 70 percent of cases, depending on the strain — ultimately death. Here’s what we know, and don’t know, about this incurable disease:

How is the Nipah virus spread?
Several species of fruit bat that live throughout Asia carry Nipah. During outbreaks in Bangladesh from 2001 to 2007, most people contracted the virus by drinking raw date palm sap that virus-carrying fruit bats had also sipped and contaminated (SN: 12/19/09, p. 15).
Bats can also transmit Nipah to pigs and other livestock, which can then pass the infection onto humans. And humans can spread the virus through saliva and possibly other bodily fluids. One victim in the latest outbreak was a 31-year-old nurse who had been treating Nipah patients.

To find the source of this outbreak, health officials in India are testing local bats, livestock and food samples, including mangos that may have been bitten by bats, found in the home of a family that lost four members to Nipah.
How does the virus cause infection?
Nipah and its viral cousin Hendra latch onto a proteins called ephrin-B2 and ephrin-B3 on the surface of nerve cells and the endothelial cells lining blood and lymph vessels, researchers have found. Nipah can also invade lung and kidney cells.

Virologists who have studied Nipah’s behavior in animals think that in humans, it initially targets the respiratory system before spreading to the nervous system and brain. Most patients who die succumb to an inflammation of blood vessels and a swelling of the brain that occurs in the later stages of the disease.

Why are epidemiologists worried about Nipah?
“The No. 1 reason is that it’s just so lethal,” says Linfa Wang, who heads the emerging infectious diseases program at the Duke-NUS Medical School in Singapore. In fact, the villain virus in the 2011 film Contagion was based on Nipah (SN Online: 10/19/11).

Since the virus was first documented in 1998, there have been small, contained outbreaks almost every year in southeast Asia and Bangladesh.

But Nipah has the potential to spread farther — due to the fact that its fruit bat carriers live across a wide range extending from Australia to West Africa.

In addition, some strains are more lethal than others. An outbreak in Malaysia in 1999 was caused by a strain with a 30 percent mortality rate, while the Bangladesh outbreaks involved a different strain that killed 70 percent of infected humans. Scientists aren’t sure why the mortality rates are so different.

Is Nipah the next Ebola?
Not quite, says Stanford University epidemiologist Stephen Luby, who has studied the disease in Bangladesh, where there have been either outbreaks or sporadic cases almost every year since 2001. The two known Nipah strains currently circulating aren’t all that easy to transmit.
While the mortality rate for those infected can be high, infection is not all that common. Before this latest outbreak, about 300 deaths had been linked to Nipah, most of which occurred in Southeast Asia and Bangladesh. But the actual number could be higher, Luby says, with some cases going untested or unreported. Because the symptoms of Nipah infection are similar to those for other diseases, including encephalitis and the flu, cases may be misdiagnosed. India has only two main diagnostic laboratories, both in the central city of Pune, equipped to confirm Nipah infection.
“In order for a disease to spread globally, each person has to infect at least more than one person,” Luby says. But a person with Nipah tends to infect either zero or one other person, according to a 2009 study published online by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. By comparison, a person with measles can infect on average 10 others who aren’t vaccinated. And people who caught Ebola during the 2014 outbreak in West Africa tended to pass it on to between one and three others, PLOS Current Outbreaks reported in 2014.

But “anytime the virus is inside a human, it has the opportunity to evolve and adapt to that human-specific environment,” Luby says. The worst-case scenario is a future strain that can transmit more quickly or easily among humans, which is why the WHO and global health experts are urging more research into vaccines and treatments.

“I hope what we learned from the Ebola outbreak, is that if we have the ability to prepare, we should do that,” says Emily Gurley, an infectious disease epidemiologist at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in Baltimore

In fact, in response to this latest outbreak, the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI), a global alliance that formed last year to encourage and finance the development of vaccines, has announced that they will be granting $25 million to two American biotech companies to accelerate work on a Nipah vaccine. Researchers have tested experimental Nipah vaccines on animals, but have yet to conduct clinical trials.

Are fruit bats the problem?
Having been around for millions of years, bats have probably carried infectious diseases for nearly as long, Gurley says. Several bat species can carry viruses that are deadly to humans, including Ebola, Marburg, SARS and Nipah, without getting sick themselves (SN: 3/9/13, p. 10).

But scientists say that villainizing bats is not the answer. “They’re a crucial part of their ecosystems,” Gurley says. “They are also really important pollinators.”

Several factors have increased the chance of bat-borne viruses being passed humans, including development that has encroached on the bats’ natural habitats. “It used to be that these bats stayed far away from human populations,” Wang says.

Don’t count on a shady parking spot to save a child left in the back seat on a hot day.

A new analysis of temperatures inside parked cars reveals that a toddler in a sunbathed vehicle would reach lethal body temperatures faster than one left in the shade. But even in a shaded car, a child could die from overheating within a few hours, researchers report online May 23 in Temperature.

Researchers tracked temps inside three cars — a sedan, economy car and minivan — that were parked in the sun, and another three parked in the shade. Each car started at the outdoor air temperature or 29.4° Celsius, whichever was cooler. On days hotter than 38° C (about 100° Fahrenheit), it took an hour for the average ambient temperature inside the shaded vehicles to reach 38.3° C. For cars in the sun, the inside temperature hit a scorching 46.7° C in an hour, with surfaces such as steering wheels, dashboards and seat covers getting even hotter.
The researchers then simulated how the body temperature of a 2-year-old would increase under those conditions. On average, a toddler’s body would reach the potentially lethal temperature of 40° C (104° F) after about 1.4 hours in the sun and about 2.4 hours in the shade. It happened faster in some cars than others — a child left in a sunbaked sedan could die from overheating in just an hour.

On average, 37 children in the United States die from heatstroke inside vehicles each year, and in more than half of those cases, the children had simply been forgotten. Car or smartphone alerts reminding drivers to check the back seat could help prevent these deaths, says coauthor Jennifer Vanos, an extreme heat and public health researcher at the University of California, San Diego.

Baby planets growing in a disk of gas and dust around an infant star have been identified and weighed for the first time. In papers published June 13 in the Astrophysical Journal Letters, two teams of astronomers describe a new technique to observe the newborn planets with unprecedented precision.

One team, led by Richard Teague of the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, found two protoplanets about the mass of Jupiter in orbit around a young star called HD 163296. The star is about 4 million years old and about 330 light-years from Earth. Another team led by Christophe Pinte of Monash University in Melbourne, Australia, spotted a third protoplanet about twice Jupiter’s mass in an even farther orbit around the same star.
Both groups used data from ALMA, the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array network of radio telescopes in Chile. ALMA data had previously revealed gaps and rings in the disks around some young stars that may have been carved out by the gravity of protoplanets (SN Online: 11/6/14). But random fluctuations in the gas and dust can produce rings and spirals without planets.
Instead of relying on the disk’s shape to give young planets away, the two groups studied the motion of the gas. The teams independently developed a way to measure the gas velocity by watching the shift in the wavelength of light emitted by carbon monoxide molecules.
The gas motions were best explained by a planetary pull, Teague says. “It would have to be an extremely contrived scenario to say that it’s not a planet.”
Teague hopes to use the technique on dozens of other stars to see what kinds of protoplanets are most common.

“On its own, it’s hard to tell whether [this system is] an outlier or fairly typical,” he says. “The power here will be how we apply this technique to other systems.”

The global network of seafloor cables may be good for more than ferrying digital communication between continents. These fiber-optic cables could also serve as underwater earthquake detectors, researchers report online June 14 in Science.

“It’s a very exciting proposition,” says Barbara Romanowicz, a seismologist at the University of California, Berkeley and the Collège de France in Paris.

Almost all seismic stations around the world are based on land, leaving many oceanic earthquakes undetected. Harnessing the million-plus kilometers of underwater fiber-optic cables to monitor seafloor earthquakes would be “a great step forward” for studying Earth’s interior, Romanowicz says.
What’s more, quake-detecting cables could bolster tsunami alert systems. “The more [seismic] stations feeding into a tsunami warning system, the faster it can give a warning,” says study coauthor Richard Luckett, a seismologist at the British Geological Survey in Edinburgh.

To use a telecommunication cable as a seismic sensor, researchers inject light from a laser into one end of the optical fiber and monitor the light that exits the other end. When a seismic wave rattles the cable, it distorts the laser light travelling through it. By comparing the original laser signal with the light that exits the cable, researchers determine how much the beam was distorted along the way — and therefore the strength of the seismic wave that strummed the cable.

Combining measurements from multiple fiber-optic cables can triangulate the earthquake’s point of origin, explains study coauthor Giuseppe Marra, a frequency metrology researcher at the National Physical Laboratory in Teddington, England. Once researchers know the strength of a seismic wave when it passed the cable and where the wave started, they can determine the original earthquake’s magnitude.
Marra and colleagues tested their quake-detecting technique on both land-based and submarine fiber-optic cables. One 79-kilometer cable in southern England sensed vibrations from quakes originating in New Zealand and Japan that seismometers put at magnitude 7.9 and 6.9, respectively. Other land-based cables in the United Kingdom and Italy sensed a magnitude 7.3 quake that rocked the Iraq-Iran border last November. And an underwater cable that runs 96 kilometers from Sicily to Malta detected a magnitude 3.4 tremor emanating from the middle of the Mediterranean Sea last September. This seismic sensing technique still needs to be tested on longer cables that cross oceans, Marra says.

Fiber-optic cables that identify earthquakes far from land could provide new insight into geologic goings-on under the sea. For instance, better views of seafloor movements could help researchers understand how volcanism at mid-ocean ridges creates new oceanic crust, Luckett says (SN: 10/19/13, p. 22). Monitoring seafloor seismic activity could also help scientists study mantle plumes, upwellings of hot, buoyant rock within Earth’s mantle, Romanowicz says (SN: 10/22/11, p. 8).

Making day-to-day activities more vigorous for a few minutes — such as briefly stepping up the pace of a walk — could offer people who don’t exercise some of the health benefits that exercisers enjoy.

That’s according to a new study of roughly 25,000 adults who reported no exercise in their free time. Those who incorporated three one- to two-minute bursts of intense activity per day saw a nearly a 40 percent drop in the risk of death from any cause compared with those whose days didn’t include such activity. The risk of death from cancer also fell by nearly 40 percent, and the risk of death from cardiovascular disease dropped almost 50 percent, researchers report online December 8 in Nature Medicine.

In a comparison with around 62,000 people who exercised regularly, including runners, gym-goers and recreational cyclists, the mortality risk reduction was similar.

“This study adds to other literature showing that even short amounts of activity are beneficial,” says Lisa Cadmus-Bertram, a physical activity epidemiologist at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, who was not involved in the research. “So many people are daunted by feeling that they don’t have the time, money, motivation, transportation, etc. to go to a gym regularly or work out for long periods of time,” she says. “The message we can take is that it is absolutely worth doing what you can.”

Emmanuel Stamatakis, an epidemiologist at the University of Sydney, and his colleagues analyzed a subset of records from the UK Biobank, a biomedical database containing health information on half a million people in the United Kingdom. The study’s non-exercising participants — more than half of whom were women and were 62 years old on average — had worn movement-tracking devices for a week.

Over an average seven years of follow-up, for those whose days included three to four bursts of activity, the mortality rate was 4.2 deaths from any cause per 1,000 people for one year. For those with no activity bursts, it was 10.4 deaths per 1,000 people for one year.

The researchers were looking for bursts of vigorous activity that met a definition determined in a laboratory study, including reaching at least 77 percent of maximum heart rate and at least 64 percent of maximum oxygen consumption. In real life, the signs that someone has reached the needed intensity level are “an increase in heart rate and feeling out of breath” in the first 15 to 30 seconds of an activity, Stamatakis says.

Regular daily activities offer several opportunities for these vigorous bursts, he says. “The simplest one is maximizing walking pace for a minute or two during any regular walk.” Other options, he says, include carrying grocery bags to the car or taking the stairs. “The largest population health gains will be realized by finding ways to get the least physically active people to move a little more.”

Look closely at a snowflake, and you’ll observe a one-of-a-kind gossamer lattice, its growth influenced by ambient conditions like temperature and humidity. Turns out, this sort of intricate self-assemblage can also occur in metals, researchers report in the Dec. 9 Science.

In pools of molten gallium, physicist Nicola Gaston and colleagues grew zinc nanostructures with symmetrical, hexagonal crystal frameworks. Such metal snowflakes could be useful for catalyzing chemical reactions and constructing electronics, says Gaston, of the MacDiarmid Institute for Advanced Materials and Nanotechnology at the University of Auckland in New Zealand.

“Self-assembly is the way nature makes nanostructures,” she says. “We’re trying to learn to do the same things.” Figuring out how to craft tiny, complex metal shapes in fewer steps and with less energy could be a boon for manufacturers.

The researchers chose gallium as a growth medium, due to its relatively low melting point, ability to dissolve many other metals and the tendency for its atoms to loosely organize while in a liquid state.

After mixing zinc into the gallium, the team subjected the alloy to elevated temperatures and different pressures, and then let the mixture cool to room temperature. The loose ordering of gallium atoms appeared to coax the crystallizing zinc to bloom into symmetrical, hexagonal structures resembling natural snowflakes and other shapes, the team found. It’s somewhat like how a fruit tray imparts order on the fruits stacked within, Gaston says.

The future may be bright for research into applications of gallium and other low-temperature liquid metals. “Not to take that snowflake metaphor too far, but [this work] really hints at new branches for scientific discovery,” Gaston says.

Meet the metric system’s newest prefixes: ronna-, quetta-, ronto- and quecto-.

Adopted November 18 at the 27th General Conference on Weights and Measures in Versailles, France, ronna- and quetta- describe exceedingly large numbers while ronto- and quecto- describe the exceedingly small. This is the first time that the International System of Units, or SI, has expanded since 1991, when the prefixes zetta-, yotta-, zepto and yocto- were added (SN: 1/16/93).

Numerically, ronna- is 1027 (that’s a digit followed by 27 zeroes) and quetta- is 1030 (30 zeroes). Their tiny counterparts ronto- and quecto- also refer to 27 and 30 zeroes, but those come after a decimal point. Until now, yotta- and yocto- (24 zeros) capped off the metric system’s range.

Science News spoke with Richard Brown, head of metrology at the National Physical Laboratory in Teddington, England, about what the latest SI expansion means for science. The following conversation has been edited for clarity and brevity.

SN: Why do we need the new prefixes?

Brown: The quantity of data in the world is increasing exponentially. And we expect that to continue to increase and probably accelerate because of quantum computing, digitalization and things like that. At the same time, this quantity of data is starting to get close to the top range of the prefixes we currently use. People start to ask what comes next?

SN: Where do the prefix names come from?

Brown: About five years ago, I heard a BBC podcast about these new names for quantities of data. And the two that they mentioned were brontobyte and hellabyte. Brontobyte, I think comes from brontosaurus being a big dinosaur and hellabyte comes from “‘hell of a big number.”

The problem with those from a metrology point of view, or measurement point of view, is they start with letters B and H, which already are in use for other units and prefixes. So we can’t have those as names. [It was clear] that we had to do something official because people were starting to need these prefixes. R and Q are not used for anything else, really, in terms of units or SI prefixes. [The prefix names themselves are] very, very loosely based on the Greek and Latin names for nine and 10.
SN: How will the prefixes be used?

Brown: The whole point of the International System of Units is it’s an accepted global system, which if you use, you will be understood.

When you use a prefix with a unit, it means that the number associated with the unit changes. And people like small numbers that they can understand. So you can express the mass of the Earth in terms of ronnagrams; it’s six ronnagrams. And equally the mass of Jupiter is two quettagrams. Some good examples of [small numbers] are that the mass of an electron is about one rontogram, and the mass of one bit of data as stored on a mobile phone is around one quectogram.

I think the use of a suitable prefix makes things more understandable. And I think we shouldn’t forget that even if there’s not always a direct scientific usage immediately, they will gain traction over time.

Tyrannosaurus rex isn’t just a king to paleontologists — the dinosaur increasingly reigns over the world of art auctions. A nearly complete skeleton known as Stan the T. rex smashed records in October 2020 when a bidding war drove its price to $31.8 million, the highest ever paid for any fossil. Before that, Sue the T. rex held the top spot; it went for $8.3 million in 1997.

That kind of publicity — and cachet — means that T. rex’s value is sky-high, and the dinosaur continues to have its teeth firmly sunk into the auction world in 2022. In December, Maximus, a T. rex skull, will be the centerpiece of a Sotheby’s auction in New York City. It’s expected to sell for about $15 million.

Another T. rex fossil named Shen was anticipated to sell for between $15 million and $25 million at a Christie’s auction in Hong Kong in late November. However, the auction house pulled it over concerns about the number of replica bones used in the fossil.
“These are astronomical sums of money, really surprising sums of money,” says Donna Yates, a criminologist at Maastricht University in the Netherlands who studies high-value collectibles.

Stan’s final price “was completely unexpected,” Yates says. The fossil was originally appraised at about $6 million — still a very large sum, though nothing like the final tally, which was the result of a three-way bidding war.

But the staggering amounts of money T. rex fossils now fetch at auction can mean a big loss for science. At those prices, the public institutions that might try to claim these glimpses into the deep past are unable to compete with deep-pocketed private buyers, researchers say.

One reason for the sky-high prices may be that T. rex fossils are increasingly being treated more like rare works of art than bits of scientific evidence, Yates says. The bones might once have been bought and sold at dusty “cowboy fossil” dealerships. But nowadays these fossils are on display in shiny gallery spaces and are being appraised and marketed as rare objets d’art. That’s appealing to collectors, she adds: “If you’re a high-value buyer, you’re a person who wants the finest things.”

But fossils’ true value is the information they hold, says Thomas Carr, a paleontologist at Carthage College in Kenosha, Wis. “They are our only means of understanding the biology and evolution of extinct animals.”

Keeping fossils of T. rex and other dinosaurs and animals in public repositories, such as museums, ensures that scientists have consistent access to study the objects, including being able to replicate or reevaluate previous findings. But a fossil sold into private or commercial hands is subject to the whim of its owner — which means anything could happen to it at any time, Carr says.
“It doesn’t matter if [a T. rex fossil] is bought by some oligarch in Russia who says scientists can come and study it,” he says. “You might as well take a sledgehammer to it and destroy it.”

A desire for one’s own T. rex
There are only about 120 known specimens of T. rex in the world. At least half of them are owned privately and aren’t available to the public. That loss is “wreaking havoc on our dataset. If we don’t have a good sample size, we can’t claim to know anything about [T. rex],” Carr says.

For example, to be able to tell all the ways that T. rex males differed from females, researchers need between 70 and 100 good specimens for statistically significant analyses, an amount scientists don’t currently have.

Similarly, scientists know little about how T. rex grew, and studying fossils of youngsters could help (SN: 1/6/20). But only a handful of juvenile T. rex specimens are publicly available to researchers. That number would double if private specimens were included.

Museums and academic institutions typically don’t have the kind of money it takes to compete with private bidders in auctions or any such competitive sales. That’s why, in the month before Stan went up for auction in 2020, the Society for Vertebrate Paleontology, or SVP, wrote a letter to Christie’s asking the auction house to consider restricting bidding to public institutions. The hope was that this would give scientists a fighting chance to obtain the specimens.

But the request was ignored — and unfortunately may have only increased publicity for the sale, says Stuart Sumida, a paleontologist at California State University in San Bernardino and SVP’s current vice president. That’s why SVP didn’t issue a public statement this time ahead of the auctions for Shen and Maximus, Sumida says, though the organization continues to strongly condemn fossil sales — whether of large, dramatic specimens or less well-known creatures. “All fossils are data. Our position is that selling fossils is not scientific and it damages science.”

Sumida is particularly appalled at statements made by auction houses that suggest the skeletons “have already been studied,” an attempt to reassure researchers that the data contained in that fossil won’t be lost, regardless of who purchases it. That’s deeply misleading, he says, because of the need for reproducibility, as well as the always-improving development of new analysis techniques. “When they make public statements like that, they are undermining not only paleontology, but the scientific process as well.”

And the high prices earned by Stan and Sue are helping to drive the market skyward, not only for other T. rex fossils but also for less famous species. “It creates this ripple effect that is incredibly damaging to science in general,” Sumida says. Sotheby’s, for example, auctioned off a Gorgosaurus, a T. rex relative, in July for $6.1 million. In May, a Deinonychus antirrhopus — the inspiration for Jurassic Park’s velociraptor — was sold by Christie’s for $12.4 million.

Protecting T. rex from collectors
Compounding the problem is the fact that the United States has no protections in place for fossils unearthed from the backyards or dusty fields of private landowners. The U.S. is home to just about every T. rex skeleton ever found. Stan, Sue and Maximus hail from the Black Hills of South Dakota. Shen was found in Montana.

As of 2009, U.S. law prohibits collecting scientifically valuable fossils, particularly fossils of vertebrate species like T. rex, from public lands without permits. But fossils found on private lands are still considered the landowner’s personal property. And landowners can grant digging access to whomever they wish.
Before the discovery of Sue the T. rex (SN: 9/6/14), private owners often gave scientific institutions free access to hunt for fossils on their land, says Bridget Roddy, currently a researcher at the legal news company Bloomberg Law in Washington, D.C. But in the wake of Sue’s sale in 1997, researchers began to have to compete for digging access with commercial fossil hunters.

These hunters can afford to pay landowners large sums for the right to dig, or even a share of the profits from fossil sales. And many of these commercial dealers sell their finds at auction houses, where the fossils can earn far more than most museums are able to pay.

Lack of federal protections for paleontological resources found on private land — combined with the large available supply of fossils — is a situation unique to the United States, Roddy says. Fossil-rich countries such as China, Canada, Italy and France consider any such finds to be under government protection, part of a national legacy.

In the United States, seizing such materials from private landowners — under an eminent domain argument — would require the government to pay “just compensation” to the landowners. But using eminent domain to generally protect such fossils wouldn’t be financially sustainable for the government, Roddy says, not least because most fossils dug up aren’t of great scientific value anyway.

There may be other, more grassroots ways to at least better regulate fossil sales, she says. While still a law student at DePaul University in Chicago, Roddy outlined some of those ideas in an article published in Texas A&M Journal of Property Law in May.

One option, she suggests, is for states to create a selective sales tax attached to fossil purchases, specifically for buyers who intend to keep their purchases in private collections that are not readily available to the public. It’s “similar to if you want to buy a pack of cigarettes, which is meant to offset the harm that buying cigarettes does to society in general,” Roddy says. That strategy could be particularly effective in states with large auction houses, like New York.

Another possibility is to model any new, expanded fossil preservation laws on existing U.S. antiquities laws, intended to preserve cultural heritage. After all, Roddy says, fossils aren’t just bones, but they’re also part of the human story. “Fossils have influenced our folklore; they’re a unifier of humanity and culture rather than a separate thing.”

Though fossils from private lands aren’t protected, many states do impose restrictions on searches for archaeological and cultural artifacts, by requiring those looking for antiquities to restore excavated land or by fining the excavation of certain antiquities without state permission. Expanding those restrictions to fossil hunting, perhaps by requiring state approval through permits, could also give states the opportunity to purchase any significant finds before they’re lost to private buyers.

Preserving fossils for science and the public
Such protections could be a huge boon to paleontologists, who may not even know what’s being lost. “The problem is, we’ll never know” all the fossils that are being sold, Sumida says. “They’re shutting scientists out of the conversation.”

And when it comes to dinosaurs, “so many of the species we know about are represented by a single fossil,” says Stephen Brusatte, a paleontologist at the University of Edinburgh. “If that fossil was never found, or disappeared into the vault of a collector, then we wouldn’t know about that dinosaur.”

Or, he says, sometimes a particularly complete or beautifully preserved dinosaur skeleton is found, and without it, “we wouldn’t be able to study what that dinosaur looked like, how it moved, what it ate, how it sensed its world, how it grew.”

The point isn’t to put restrictions on collecting fossils so much as making sure they remain in public view, Brusatte adds. “There’s nothing as magical as finding your own fossils, being the first person ever to see something that lived millions of years ago.” But, he says, unique and scientifically invaluable fossils such as dinosaur skeletons should be placed in museums “where they can be conserved and studied and inspire the public, rather than in the basements or yachts of the oligarch class.”

After its record-breaking sale, Stan vanished for a year and a half, its new owners a mystery. Then in March 2022, news surfaced that the fossil had been bought by the United Arab Emirates, which stated it intends to place Stan in a new natural history museum.

Sue, too, is on public view. The fossil is housed at Chicago’s Field Museum of Natural History, thanks to the pooled financial resources of the Walt Disney Corporation, the McDonald Corporation, the California State University System and others. That’s the kind of money it took to get the highest bid on a T. rex 25 years ago.

And those prices only seem to be going up. Researchers got lucky with Sue, and possibly Stan.

As for Shen, the fossil’s fate remains in limbo: It was pulled from auction not due to outcry from paleontologists, but over concerns about intellectual property rights. The fossil, at 54 percent complete, may have been supplemented with a polyurethane cast of bones from Stan, according to representatives of the Black Hills Institute of Geological Research in Hill City, S.D. That organization, which discovered Stan, retains a copyright over the skeleton.

In response to those concerns, Christie’s pulled the lot, and now says that it intends to loan the fossil to a museum. But this move doesn’t reassure paleontologists. “A lot of people are pleased that the sale didn’t go through,” Sumida says. “But it sort of just kicks the can down the road.… It doesn’t mean they’re not going to try and sell it in another form, somewhere down the road.”

Ultimately, scientists simply can’t count on every important fossil finding its way to the public, Carr says. “Those fossils belong in a museum; it’s right out of Indiana Jones,” he says. “It’s not like they’re made in a factory somewhere. Fossils are nonrenewable resources. Once Shen is gone, it’s gone.”