When Jurassic Corp. has recovered about 40 percent of the skeleton -- enough to indicate that the beast is close to complete -- Japh will begin trying to sell it, most likely to a museum that will organize its own diggers to finish removing the beast. (The Spanish museum brings crews of twentysomethings to the site, industrious kids looking for an adventure. So far, the museum has dug about 70 percent of its camarasaur, and Jim figures it's likely to recover a good bit more.)
One of Jurassic's next steps will be figuring out which apatosaur the skull belongs to. So far, that part of the quarry has yielded the pelvises of at least three -- all female, one of them a juvenile. (Lace is rooting for the baby; Japh is hoping not to find too many other individuals' bones mixed in, which would make for a harder digging and reassembly job.) It's not clear how any of the apatosaurs' bodies ended up in the lakebed -- they could have been dragged in by a predator or washed up in a flood -- and it looks like another dinosaur walked on the body, crushing and scattering the bits. But the lake's silty bottom appears to have been fairly stable; Jim and Japh seem confident that almost all the skeleton's pieces are there for the finding.
Sometime later this year, Japh will begin looking for a buyer. Jim Wyatt is a commercial dealer based in Garland, Texas; his Fossilnet.com sells everything from ammonites to T. rexes via the Internet. He estimates that if an apatosaur skeleton is out of the ground and 75 percent complete, it would command at least $125,000 -- more if the bones are in good shape.
But at this point, Japh is reluctant to guess how much Jurassic Corp.'s apatosaur might sell for. There are too many variables: he can't yet say how much of the skeleton the company can guarantee, how much of the skull they'll be able to offer, or even how the world economy will be running in a few months. The price will also depend on how much work Jurassic Corp. has to do; obviously, if the buyer does some of the digging and preparation, the price will be lower.
The price, though, isn't everything. Japh notes that the apatosaur's marrow cavities are filled with agate -- a rarity. Were he simply trying to make the most money possible, he'd leave science to hang and sell the agate to jewelers ounce by ounce.
Still, the money matters. Lace would like to keep all of her fossils, but she also wants to buy more equipment, to spend more time looking for bones, to survive financially as a dinosaur hunter. Survival, of course, is the bottom line. And if being fast-moving and hot-blooded helps her beat the competition, so be it.
