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  • 5 hours ago
Egos, money and science intersect in this modern American parable that follows the king of the dinosaurs and those who unearth its remains. Paleontologist Dr. Thomas Carr hopes his latest find, a juvenile T. rex, can keep his crucial research alive as he navigates the crumbling world of academia and relentless funding pressure. Meanwhile, commercial fossil hunter Alan Detrich leads multimillion-dollar dinosaur auctions and teams up with a Kansas museum to show off a T. rex specimen so rare it could change the face of prehistory. As these two titans of paleontology clash, we are confronted with two paths for the future of science: raw capitalism or putting collective knowledge before the pursuit of profit.
Transcript
00:00I like to say that millionaires can't afford my fossils.
00:03It takes billionaires to buy my fossils.
00:10I spend most of my time in museum collections,
00:13collecting data on every transistor specimen.
00:16It's hundreds of hours, isn't it?
00:18Yeah, we're close to 300 for this year.
00:20I'm currently struggling.
00:22Last I counted, there's at least a dozen T. rex that are privately owned,
00:27and science can't touch it.
00:29Bam!
00:31This is what everybody wants to see.
00:33Our baby T. rex is the prince of capitalism.
00:37T. rex is the king. A baby's got to be a prince.
00:40There's a real conflict of interest behind a lot of commercial collecting.
00:44The commercial market is tied to exceedingly wealthy individuals
00:48who have money to drive prices up.
00:50I mean, how do you not love a dinosaur?
00:52The stuff is so unique and one of a kind.
00:54When you have dinosaurs being sold in auction houses,
00:59you know, the dinosaur in your backyard could worth millions of dollars.
01:03Museums cannot compete.
01:04Six inches, this thing coming at you.
01:07P. T. Barnum said, you want to draw a crowd, start a fight.
01:13I think whoever sees the most fossils wins.
01:17The more fossils I can study, the bigger the body of knowledge is for natural history.
01:22He's using us and we're using him.
01:24Academia doesn't want commercial fossil hunters stepping on their toes.
01:29It kind of hurts when you're making $60,000 a year.
01:32Amidst campus-wide cuts, the school stopped funding the institute's preparator position.
01:37This program will not survive.
01:40You spend a lot of your life doing work that you thought was good and valuable
01:44and to find out that maybe that isn't true, it's kind of devastating.
01:47In the fossil business, if you can afford it, you can buy it here in this country.
01:51That's what makes America great.
01:53Money beats science once again.
01:55Money beats science once again.
01:57Money beats science once again.
01:59Money beats science once again.
01:59Money beats science once again.

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