4 hours agoMatthew ShermanThe first stegosaurus skeleton to go under the hammer is set to fetch millions of dollars in New York. But the extraordinary discovery was made by chance, thousands of miles away out west during one man’s birthday stroll, writes Stephen Smith.It’s every child’s dream to wander into the garden and come face to face with a real-life dinosaur, ideally one of the less terrifying ones which follow a sensible plant-based diet.For most of us, a dream is all it is, but not for a man called Jason Cooper.He has encountered dinosaurs in his backyard not once but on many different occasions.In fact, when he goes for a stroll around his property in the American Southwest, he’s more likely than not to run into a creature from prehistoric times.But even so, he may never come across a specimen quite like the one he stumbled upon a couple of years ago, an animal so massive that if it appeared on a London street, it would measure up to an old, double-decker Routemaster bus – though you’d want to be careful about which one you boarded.It was an enormous stegosaurus, in excellent condition for a beast that’s spent the past 150 million years below ground.Jason CooperIt’s almost 11.5ft tall (3.5m) and fully 27ft from the top of its head to the tip of its scaly tail.Mr Cooper has dubbed it “Apex”, because its formidable dimensions would have made it a dominant animal in its environment.With the help of some friends, he’s cleaned it up and put it back together again.And if you’ve always had the fantasy of bumping into a dinosaur on your lawn, you can make it come true – if you can lay your hands on $4m-$6m.Apex is about to become the first stegosaurus to go under the hammer at auction.Bidding is expected to be brisk. Dinosaur fossils have become desirable trophies, coveted by successful tech entrepreneurs and Hollywood stars.This has caused much dismay among academic palaeontologists, who claim that allowing them to end up in private hands hinders scientific research and denies the public the chance of appreciating them.Nicolas Cage reportedly purchased a tyrannosaurus skull for more than £185,000 in 2007 after a bidding war with Leonardo DiCaprio, though he returned it after it emerged that it had been stolen.Mark Garlick/Science Photo LibraryMr Cooper is a professional fossil hunter, having turned the childhood dream of discovering dinosaurs into reality, with the pragmatism of a theatre buff deciding to rent close to Broadway. He and his family live in Colorado on top of a geological feature known as the Morrison Formation, a stretch of sedimentary rock dating back to the Jurassic period which covers 600,000 square miles of the western United States. The Morrison Formation is to dinosaurs what California was to nuggets o …
Article Attribution | Read More at Article Source
[mwai_chat context=”Let’s have a discussion about this article:nn4 hours agoMatthew ShermanThe first stegosaurus skeleton to go under the hammer is set to fetch millions of dollars in New York. But the extraordinary discovery was made by chance, thousands of miles away out west during one man’s birthday stroll, writes Stephen Smith.It’s every child’s dream to wander into the garden and come face to face with a real-life dinosaur, ideally one of the less terrifying ones which follow a sensible plant-based diet.For most of us, a dream is all it is, but not for a man called Jason Cooper.He has encountered dinosaurs in his backyard not once but on many different occasions.In fact, when he goes for a stroll around his property in the American Southwest, he’s more likely than not to run into a creature from prehistoric times.But even so, he may never come across a specimen quite like the one he stumbled upon a couple of years ago, an animal so massive that if it appeared on a London street, it would measure up to an old, double-decker Routemaster bus – though you’d want to be careful about which one you boarded.It was an enormous stegosaurus, in excellent condition for a beast that’s spent the past 150 million years below ground.Jason CooperIt’s almost 11.5ft tall (3.5m) and fully 27ft from the top of its head to the tip of its scaly tail.Mr Cooper has dubbed it “Apex”, because its formidable dimensions would have made it a dominant animal in its environment.With the help of some friends, he’s cleaned it up and put it back together again.And if you’ve always had the fantasy of bumping into a dinosaur on your lawn, you can make it come true – if you can lay your hands on $4m-$6m.Apex is about to become the first stegosaurus to go under the hammer at auction.Bidding is expected to be brisk. Dinosaur fossils have become desirable trophies, coveted by successful tech entrepreneurs and Hollywood stars.This has caused much dismay among academic palaeontologists, who claim that allowing them to end up in private hands hinders scientific research and denies the public the chance of appreciating them.Nicolas Cage reportedly purchased a tyrannosaurus skull for more than £185,000 in 2007 after a bidding war with Leonardo DiCaprio, though he returned it after it emerged that it had been stolen.Mark Garlick/Science Photo LibraryMr Cooper is a professional fossil hunter, having turned the childhood dream of discovering dinosaurs into reality, with the pragmatism of a theatre buff deciding to rent close to Broadway. He and his family live in Colorado on top of a geological feature known as the Morrison Formation, a stretch of sedimentary rock dating back to the Jurassic period which covers 600,000 square miles of the western United States. The Morrison Formation is to dinosaurs what California was to nuggets o …nnDiscussion:nn” ai_name=”RocketNews AI: ” start_sentence=”Can I tell you more about this article?” text_input_placeholder=”Type ‘Yes'”]
