“The Dinosaur Artist” Review: Bad Boy Makes Old Bones Big Business

by Richard Conniff/The Wall Street Journal

On a Thursday afternoon in May 2012, a paleontologist named Bolortsetseg Minjin was having lunch near the American Museum of Natural History in New York when she heard a news broadcast about a spectacular dinosaur being put up for auction. It was a specimen of Tarbosaurus bataar, a 70-million-year-old close kin and look-alike of Tyrannosaurus rex.

Heritage Auctions, which bills itself as “the world’s largest collectibles auctioneer,” had it splashed across the centerfold of its sale catalog. In midstride, with the mouth on the 4-foot-long skull gaping to show its spiky teeth, and its counterbalancing tail stretched out behind, Lot 49135 stood 8 feet tall and 24 feet long. The auction would take place that Sunday afternoon, just three days off, at a converted warehouse a short subway ride south of the museum. The estimate was that it would sell for $950,000 to $1.5 million. There was only one hitch:

Do Foxes Get Any Cuter Than This?

I’m in Beijing, where I spent most of the day talking about pterosaurs at the motherlode of recent pterosaur discovery, the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology. Afterward, I went across the street and saw these guys. They’re corsac foxes,  new to me, denizens of central Asia into Mongolia. Sorry, I don’t normally