The private market for fossils is getting increasingly high priced.

I think my jaw is permanently dislocated from the time when I woke up and I read this bottle the month for almost $45 million.

It's Monday, August 12th, and today is Science Friday. I'm Cyfry producer Charles Berquist. Last month Apex, a stegosaurus skeleton sold to a private

buyer for more than $44 million. The sale of

dinosaur fossils has become more and more profitable in recent years and some

paleontologists are not too happy about it, especially if fossils become less available for research.

Guest host Kathleen Davis spoke to paleontologist Steve Brissotti, professor of paleontology

at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland.

So let's start with this specific specimen that was just sold. What makes Apex so special?

It is a really important dinosaur fossil. This is a skeleton of a stegosaurus.

stegosaurus is one of those iconic dinosaurs. It's the ones with the plates on its back,

the spikes on its tail, the tiny little brain in its head. It's on that roster of dinosaurs with T-Rex, with triceratops, with brontosaurus, that we all learn as young kids. So it's an icon as a dinosaur and this particular skeleton is really well preserved.

Almost all the bones are there and believe it or not Stegosaurus, although it's a very famous dinosaur,

it's not actually known from a whole lot of fossil skeleton.

So it's famous but rare and this fossil really is a crown jewel type of skeleton.

So how has the sale of fossils evolved over time? I mean is this kind of a newer

concept or is this something that's been going on for a while? It's a little bit of both. So of course people have been finding encountering fossils

since time immemorial. It's only been in the last couple of hundred years or so

that museums, especially in the Western world and universities, have studied these fossils, put these fossils on display, and that modern scientists have realized that these bones belong to extinct giant reptiles and other animals.

So that's a relatively new concept and really ever since museums have started to display fossils, fossils have been bought and sold.

And museums have paid people to go out looking for fossils.

Many of the great museum collections around the world, whether it's the American Museum of Natural History in New York,

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