Mail Day Investigates: Why are Dinosaur Fossils So Cheap?

Part of the beauty of the Mail Day newsletter is our unrelenting quest to find answers.”Why aren’t more people buying Leaf?” “Why do they keep making Panini Monopoly sets?” “How do I cash in on this WhatNot legal situation?” 

Today’s topic? Dinosaur fossils…and why they’re so cheap. 

You may have watched The Dinosaurs on Netflix (chances are you did; its popularity on the “most streamed” charts worldwide has been surpassed only by season 4 of Bridgerton). And if you collect anything at all, you may have thought, “I wonder how much dinosaur fossils cost?” I did. And I was shocked at how affordable they were. $7 for a Mosasuar tooth (and I know that’s not a “dinosaur” technically, but just play along for now, please; it has “saur” in its name), $25 for a piece of a Triceratops frill shield, $85 for a T-rex bone?? It seemed too good to be true. And so I did a deep dive on trying to figure out who was legit and who wasn’t, and all roads led me back to two places: Fossil Era (a legit standalone site) and HellCreekDino (on ebay). 

So I shot a note to Fossil Era, and Shawn Rodgers – who is pretty much out of central casting for his job – got back to me and agreed to answer a bunch of questions as a primer for those of us looking to start collecting fossils. 

Our first question, the obvious one: why are 100 million year old teeth so cheap?

“Because they can be,” Rodgers explained. Fossil Era imports Mosasuar teeth “by the thousands,” Rodgers says, because they’re uncovered regularly as part of phosphate mining in Morocco. The mining companies don’t want them, so they sell them to fossil dealers, who can then pass them off to consumers and collectors for $7.

Their bestseller? The slightly-more-expensive Spinosaurus teeth, which they also get by the thousands. 

“We sit down and grade each one and we measure them and take pictures and describe them and all that stuff,” Rodgers says. “And the consumer is left with a really good product that's honest.”

And how is something so iconic, like a Triceratops shield fragment, so affordable? Rodgers says that, more often than you think, a partial or damaged skeleton is discovered that can’t be put back together – “you end up with 50 pieces of a Triceratops shield that can’t be reassembled into what that actually looked like in life” – and the pieces are literally thrown in a bucket and sent to the dealers. 

The Tyrannosaurus Rex skeleton fragments featured on the site, Rodgers says, came from a damaged “surface find” and the skeleton was so weathered away that  “it just wasn't going to make sense to try to make a complete animal out of it.” And so, depending on how your tax returns went this year, you can buy a 2” fragment of a mighty, 65 million year-old T-Rex for under $50, or go bigger into larger fragments and teeth for hundreds and thousands of dollars. The most feared and iconic dinosaur ever — on your shelf at home.

I asked Rodgers what he would buy if he was new at this and had about $250 to spend.

“I'd be looking at either a Megalodon tooth, a piece of a T-Rex bone or maybe a Spino tooth,” he said. He also suggested looking at Trilobites, which are not cheap but – they do look very cool. And you can still get some lower-end, intact ones for under $40. 

One thing Rodgers also suggested is trying out a dig site — they operate a quarry, Fossil Safari, in Wyoming, where people can come and dig for fossils. “More fossils come out of the southwest corner of Wyoming than anywhere else on the planet,” he says.

And Rodgers’ number one tip for starting your collection? 

“I just prefer — and I think most people prefer — to just collect what they like.”

Our kind of guy!

Before we part ways this week, I want to leave you all with a conundrum I’m facing in my “buy or don’t buy?” daily life. I have, of course, already spent $200 at Fossil Era and another $40 at Hell Creek Dino. For the kids!!

But one thing I have eBay searches set up for – and I’ve hit up Fanatics Collect and every other site – is the “Jump Man at Work” card from the 1982 Donkey Kong set – widely considered to be the Mario rookie card. I can’t find a graded version for under $100. 

I started searching for boxes and got sidetracked by sales of the Intellivision game. This seemed “dinosaur tooth cheap” and so I bought one, obviously. Actual boxes of the cards start at around $430, and there’s largely no guarantee it hasn’t been opened, rifled through, and resealed… but man I want to open one. 

So search on, I shall. I’d take a raw one for about $40-50 but I’m not sure that’s going to happen. And the math on a full box doesn’t work unless I’m getting 8 “Jump Man at Work”s. If anyone has any thoughts on this one, feel free to write in! 

Until next week, friends! May your dinosaur fossil collections be started on the right foot. Or tooth!