The Dinosaur Dealers by John Long, Allen and Unwin, A$27.22, ISBN 1865088293 Reviewed by Jeff Hecht
LIKE a traditional mystery, The Dinosaur Dealers opens with a crime and a matrix of uneasy tensions. The crime is the October 1996 theft of two stegosaur footprints from the remote coast of Western Australia. The prints are sacred to the local Aborigines and valuable to science, because stegosaur tracks are particularly rare. The tensions are between the scientists who study fossils and the dealers who make their livings selling them.
Talk with academic palaeontologists, and you find a sometimes-grudging respect for many professional fossil hunters. The best of the dealers are thoroughgoing experts, who may lack academic credentials, but have a solid working knowledge of geology and palaeontology, and care about fossils. They document excavations carefully, present scientific papers and offer unique specimens to museums.
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Yet over a beer or around a campfire you can hear about the seamy side of the fossil trade. Some dealers are said to traffic in drugs as well as fossils 鈥� perhaps using the fossil business as a cover. Rumours hint that the Russian mafia may be behind thefts from the Paleontological Institute in Moscow. Smuggling is widespread, and Chinese birds and dinosaur eggs are sold widely, although Chinese officials say they cannot be exported legally.
Australian palaeontologist John Long set out to explore this shadowy world for a new television documentary by Alan Carter. Working with Steve Rogers, a Wyoming law officer wise in the ways of fossil thieves and crooks in general, he found no sign of the missing prints in Australia. They carried on their search around the world, visiting dealers in Europe and the US, the annual Arizona Mineral and Fossil show in Tucson, and the Chinese fossil beds famed for their feathered dinosaurs. Posing as wealthy Americans, they found dealers with fossils too hot to put on public display, and were tailed by sinister-looking types afterwards.
Long鈥檚 travelogue is a bit hurried at times, but nonetheless does an excellent job portraying the complexities of the international fossil trade. It鈥檚 a world where fish fossils legally dug from private land in the US sit beside fossil birds smuggled out of China. Dealers show paperwork supposedly documenting the legality of the Chinese birds: the papers are probably forged, but they might as well be laundry lists in the US, where almost no one can read Chinese.
The good news is that the book is both entertaining and thought-provoking. The bad news is that the stegosaur prints are still missing.