A dinosaur hunter stumbles upon a discovery worth a million dollars

The first stegosaurus skeleton to go under the hammer is set to fetch millions of dollars in New York. But the remarkable discovery was made by chance, thousands of miles to the west during one man’s birthday walk, writes Stephen Smith.

Every child’s dream is to wander into the garden and come face-to-face with a real dinosaur, ideally one of the less terrifying ones that follow a sensible plant-based diet.

For most of us, a dream is everything, but not for a man named Jason Cooper.

He encountered dinosaurs in his backyard not once, but on many different occasions.

In fact, when he goes for a walk around his property in the American Southwest, he’s more likely to run into a prehistoric creature.

But even then, he may never come across a specimen like the one he ran into a few years ago, an animal so huge that if it appeared on a London street it would measure up to an old Routemaster double-decker bus – although you should watch out for which you boarded.

It was a huge stegosaurus, in excellent condition for a beast that had spent the last 150 million years underground.

It stands nearly 11.5 feet (3.5 m) tall and a full 27 feet from the top of its head to the tip of its scaly tail.

Mr. Cooper named it “Apex,” because its enormous dimensions would have made it the dominant animal in its environment.

With the help of some friends, he cleaned it and put it back together.

And if you’ve always fantasized about bumping into a dinosaur on your lawn, you can make it happen—if you can get your hands on $4 million to $6 million.

Apex will soon become the first stegosaurus to go up for auction.

Competition is expected to be fierce. Dinosaur fossils have become coveted trophies, coveted by successful tech entrepreneurs and Hollywood stars.

This has caused great consternation among academic paleontologists, who argue that allowing them to end up in private hands hinders scientific research and denies the public a chance to appreciate them.

Nicolas Cage reportedly bought the tyrannosaurus skull for more than £185,000 in 2007 after a bidding war with Leonardo DiCaprio, although he returned it after it turned out to be stolen.

Mr. Cooper is a professional fossil hunter who made a childhood dream of discovering dinosaurs a reality with the pragmatism of a theatergoer who decided to rent near Broadway.

He and his family live in Colorado on top of a geologic feature known as the Morrison Formation, a series of Jurassic sedimentary rocks that cover 600,000 square miles of the western United States.

The Morrison Formation is to dinosaurs what California was to gold nuggets in the mid-19th century.

And for the romantically inclined, Mr. Cooper and his fellow prospectors are on America’s last frontier, an unknown land beneath their own muddy boots.

He owns a little less than 100 hectares from which he has extracted 10 dinosaurs in the last ten years. And to hear him tell it, collecting his biggest find to date was literally a walk in the park.

It was his 45th birthday and when a friend asked him what he wanted, he said the best present would be a new dinosaur and so they set off. And as they climbed up the mountain, Mr. Cooper saw a femur sticking out of the rock.

“We looked around. My friend found some vertebrae. I said, ‘Oh my God, this is going to be a really great birthday!'”

The cliff of clay, mud and sand on which Cooper spotted Apex is like a cross-section of all the deposits that have been deposited in that part of the world over time.

“I saw tail spikes sticking out and several large plates on the back. I could tell he was still curled up.”

After the fossil hunters recorded as much information as possible about where Apex was found, its bones were taped into protective “jackets” of plaster and burlap and lifted onto a trailer.

At Cooper’s dino-shop, work began on cleaning and reassembling the stegosaur, with equipment including sandblasting nozzles, pneumatic chisels and powerful microscopes.

Fossilization meant that the bones were encased in rock; this was painstakingly removed to reveal the skeleton of the animal.

“Apex is 70% complete which is amazing for a dinosaur, especially a stegosaurus,” Cooper said.

To put that into context, ideas of “completeness” in the fossil world are about as barbed as a stegosaurus’ tail, according to Cassandra Hatton of Sotheby’s, who is overseeing the sale.

“No one has ever found 100% of the dinosaurs. A stegosaur this good is hard to find, she says. “I think it’s going to be incredibly important.”

Apex doesn’t seem to be damaged in fights with other creatures. The only indication of wear and tear was that its lower vertebrae were fused to its pelvis, a result of arthritis, suggesting that the stegosaurus had enjoyed a long life before spending eternity in the ground.

It will now be carefully disassembled again, before the long and steady journey overland from Cooper’s space to the Sotheby’s sales premises in Manhattan, where the Apex will be reassembled and shown to the public and potential buyers in July.

It’s been 200 years since natural historians began classifying dinosaurs, and their successors are regretting the sale of Apex on this anniversary.

Steve Brusatte, a professor of palaeontology and evolution at the University of Edinburgh, who is originally from the US, says that stegosaurus specimens are very rare and, if they are genuine, this one belongs in a museum.

“It is a great pity when a fossil like this, which could educate and arouse the curiosity of so many people, simply disappears in the villa of an oligarch.”

In the UK, fossil enthusiasts are generally allowed to keep smaller, common varieties, such as shells and corals, but must report any significant finds.

There are no such restrictions in the US, where anyone who digs up a dinosaur on their own property has the right to do whatever they want with it, and that includes making a nice living off of it.

Jason Cooper is defending the sale of the stegosaurus he found, arguing that he and his critics are essentially on the same page.

“The collectors and philanthropists who buy these dinosaurs might enjoy them at home for a few years, but then they name the fossils after them and give them to institutions,” he tells the BBC. Cooper says he himself donated to public collections.

When the sale is over, Cooper will return to dinosaur land, looking for more fossils, some of which he will donate to public collections. Of course, they are not very rare where it comes from. He compares the discovery of dinosaurs to another childhood dream that sounds almost as improbable. “It’s like looking for gold coins, except you know where the king’s abacus used to be.”

Stephen Smith is a writer and broadcaster