A Roaring Trade

The market for dinosaur fossils is booming, thanks in part to a new generation of mysterious, moneyed collectors from Asia.

- Oliver Giles

On a quiet, leafy road in Singapore’s upscale Upper Thomson district sits what appears to be a conventional family home. But anyone who steps through the front door is in for a shock—it’s like stumbling into Jurassic Park.

“I have more than 1,000 fossils in my collection,” says Calvin Chu, a partner at consulting firm Eden Strategy Institute. An enormous skull of a prognathodon giganteus—a 10-metre-long, prehistoric marine reptile that looks like a cross between a whale and a crocodile—sits next to his dining table. Rows of custom-built cabinets house artefacts that include the tooth of a tyrannosaurus rex and a 4.4 billion-year-old rock, one of the world’s oldest.

“Some collectors are proud of ‘taming’ a prehistoric beast that sits on their mantle,” says Chu. “But for myself, standing at the foot of a giant dinosaur or a ferocious ancient predator humbles me, and gives me perspective on how trivial the day-to-day issues we may be dealing with might be. I guess when astronomers contend with the vastness of space, it is a very similar feeling of smallness.”

Chu is not alone in his obsession with dinosaurs. Interest in collecting fossils is booming, with prices rising astronomically as buyers vie for the top specimens at auctions and in galleries. Fossil fanatics Nicolas Cage and Leonardo DiCaprio have both made headlines with their purchases, but many of the new crop of big-spending collectors are based in Asia: secretive connoisseurs from China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Thailand, Singapore, Indonesia and the Philippines have collectively spent tens of millions of US dollars on fossils over the past decade.