TUCSON GEM AND FOSSIL SHOW

Picture the ballroom of a Tucson hotel cluttered with giant skeletons of longdead creatures, and men in plaid pants speaking in inscrutable accents. In a quiet corner, two buyers whisper opinions on whether or not $145 is a good price for a polished walrus bone fossil, and if it would look good on Uncle Gene's barbershop wall. Just when you think the scene can't get any stranger, along comes a man holding a pig's skull over his head. “I need money!” he calls. “What can I get for this? Where's the money?” It materializes before long, and the skull changes hands for $400.

For 46 years, Tucson has hosted a gem and mineral show, a wintertime event that draws buyers and sellers from around the world. But over the past two decades this biggest show of its kind has expanded further with the growth of a new business - the trading of fossil specimens.

Now known as the Tucson Gem, Mineral and Fossil Showcase, its main draws are gems, minerals and their associated geodes, meteorites and jewelry. But fossils have become a big niche.

Everything from trilobites, extinct marine buglike creatures preserved in rock, to 20,000-year-old wolf skeletons and replicas of gigantic Tyrannosaurus rexes are bought and sold at the show's various displays.

In addition to the anchor show at the Convention Center, thousands of small independent dealers come to Tucson and set up at one of 21 other shows around the city. Hotel rooms become a litter of bones, teeth and skulls. Buyers flash thick wads of bills as they partake of what has been called the Wall Street of fossil trading. Customers include museums, owners of rock and gift shops, private collectors and, particularly, other dealers.

If you want to round out your collection with the purchase of a Pleistocene-era bear jaw unearthed in Alaska, this is the place. At the Ramada Inn-University, one fossil-trading venue, it'll run $95.

Dinosaur egg shells, about the size of a fingernail, go for $10. The hair of a woolly mammoth costs up to $40, depending on whether it's preserved in a fist-size globe or framed like a picture.

Gary Harris, a dealer from Delta, Utah, sells many of his smallest trilobites, which cost as little as $1, to museums looking for something inexpensive to hand out to school kids.

“Everything with a backbone Evolved from this critter,” says Harris, running his hand through a cardboard box full of product. “Some of these are 500 million years old.” But the big action takes place in dinosaur fossils. Remember the raptor that scared the pants off those kids in the kitchen in Jurassic Park? At the Tucson show, you can buy something similar - a 10-foot-high leaping bird of prey called a Dromaeosaur - and put it in your own kitchen for $39,000.

Its remnants abundant today because of its easily fossilized exoskeleton, the trilobite ranged in size from less than an inch to more than 10 inches and roamed the world's oceans some 500 million years ago.

DINOSAURS TRILOBITES & WOOLLY MAMMOTH HAIR TRILOBITE Fossil Hunters Find More Than Pretty Rocks at Tucson's Big Gem and Mineral Show

DINOSAURS TRILOBITES & WOOLLY MAMMOTH HAIR

Sedona artist Michael Trcic, who worked as the key sculptor and puppeteer of the lifesize T rex for the movie, makes sculptural reconstructions of dinosaurs.

"Most of my collectors are professionals," says Trcic, standing beside his fiercelooking creation. "A lot are doctors, and that makes sense because they're into anatomy. This piece was commissioned by a doctor in Philadelphia who wanted it for his sculpture garden."

But some scientists are troubled by the explosion in the fossil trade, saying it retards the efforts of scientists to learn more about dinosaurs and their times. "If a rare find goes to a wealthy private collector, it's usually not written up and studied by scientists. It's out of their reach," says Bob Scarborough, head of a dinosaur excavation team at Tucson's Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum.

Universities and small museums can't compete with the kind of money put on the table by rich buyers. And when profit drives discovery, the excavation isn't always done carefully.

"A private collector might go in and get the bones out with dynamite and not bother with the overall science of the site," says Scarborough.

Another troubling issue is where and how a fossil is obtained. Commercial dealers aren't allowed to dig on federal land, but it happens, and a few poach on private land.

But many states sell permits authorizing digs, and private landowners, particularly ranchers, have found a lucrative new enterprise selling leases.

A dealer in fish fossils, for example, might pay $15,000 to $35,000 for the right to dig for a year at a specific quarry site on a rancher's property, plus a 10 percent commission on all sales. And some ranchers sell multiple leases, meaning that, say, five collectors can work separate quarries at the same time.

Those who defend the bone trade say it actually furthers science.

"Museums are limited in what they can spend to dig up fossils," says Trcic. "And if commercial collectors can't do it either, think of what'll be lost. Bones will erode to the surface and be gone. It's better to have them preserved. Some of the greatest discoveries in paleontology have been made by private collectors."

Demand drives the business.

"It's probably the fault of us paleontologists," says Jack Horner, curator of paleontology at the Museum of the Rockies in Bozeman, Montana. "We've made some interesting discoveries that have gotten people's attention. When you have T rexes running around in the movies eating everything, people want a piece of one."

Ask any dealer at the Tucson show about dinosaurs and you're likely to hear about a childhood fixation that turned into a hobby, then a business.

Neal Larson remembers spending winter days hunting horse teeth embedded in the ground in the basement of his South Dakota home. Today, along with his brother, Peter, he runs the Black Hills

MIOPLOSUS

Institute of Geological Research, Inc. in Hill City, South Dakota.

One of the most eye-catching displays at the 1998 Tucson show is the company's replica of the head and neck of a T rex, the largest of all dinosaurs. The original, which sits in a museum the Black Hills Institute runs in Hill City, South Dakota, measures 40 feet long and 11.5 feet high, and is the second-largest in the world.

The company is selling its head and neck replica, made from casts of the original, for $15,000. The full-size replica sells for $100,000.

"These replicas make the real thing available to more people at a great savings over the originals," says Larson.

In 1990, Larson's company discovered Sue, 90 percent complete and the largest T rex skeleton ever uncovered. It was seized by the government in 1997 after a long legal dispute and eventually drew $8.6 million for the Indian landowner after Larson's contract for surface rights was ruled invalid.

Black Hills Institute workers took three weeks just to collect all the T rex bones that make up the full-size original kept in Hill City. Then 23 workers spent a year and a half preparing them. The skull alone has 49 individual bones, and each one took one person a month to clean. Total project time: 25,000 hours.

The result is stunning and draws interest from around the world.

Tokyo teacher and writer Yoshito Ito attended the last 12 Tucson shows. He waves his hand at the T rex replica's giant head, and explains "The Japanese see something like this and say, 'Whoa! You mean I can own that?' But mostly it's museums buying them because, well, our apartments in Japan are quite small."

In an adjacent building, Vito Bertucci sits beneath a massive jaw, large enough to drive a jeep through, lined with four rows of fossilized shark's teeth.

It took Bertucci 20 years of diving in a South Carolina river to gather all 200 teeth, the largest of which is almost 8 inches long. Asking price for the fiberglass jaw with the fossilized teeth: A cool million. He might just get it, too. He turned down a bid of $800,000 at a New York City auction.

"I put my life on the line to collect these teeth; I'm not giving it away," says Bertucci, a Manhattan jeweler who quit his job and moved to South Carolina to become a professional hunter of shark's teeth. Once, while diving in the Morgan River, within sight of the ocean, he found some teeth lying in sediment. As he dug at the river bottom, he felt something brush his leg and turned to see a 15-foot tiger shark that had been pulled into the river by the tide.

"I took off swimming, and as I was going by, he grabbed my fin and bit it in half like a razor," says Bertucci. But the find was too rich to ignore, so he re-placed the fin and went back down.

"When he came up to me again, I jabbed him with a screwdriver, and he took off and bumped into my buddy, dislocat-ing his shoulder. I popped the shoulder back in, and we went down for anoth-er dive."

The trade in shark's teeth has grown more competitive since Bertucci started in 1971. In South Carolina, anyone can buy an $18 hunting permit from the state, and the number of dealers has mushroomed.

"I still make a good living, but it's harder," says Bertucci. "The rivers I'm diving now, I'm keeping them secret. Too many people follow me around."

A stroll along the row of rooms at the Ramada Inn makes Bertucci's point. Banners hanging from balconies proclaim the availability of shark's teeth. Jim and Susan Pendergraft of Largo, Florida, have their collection, numbering in the tens of thousands, spread out on beds and tables in their room. They sell teeth for as little as $7.

"Come on, every kid wants a shark's tooth," says Susan, a former teacher. "Even bigkids." The Pendergrafts' inventory includes a deep-water whale skull for $4,500 and a million-year-old alligator snapping turtle for $2,500.

Den Kingery specializes in fossilized fish preserved in shale taken from private quarries at Green River, Wyoming. He sells to dealers and individual collectors, some of whom are quite specific in what they want.

"Your avid collector might look for a specific fish," says Kingery, who owned a bar before he formed Den's Petrified Critters, Inc., based in Rock Springs, Wyoming. "They might also want what was around the fish in the same sediment, such as turtles and stingrays. That's how collectors are. If you're a stamp collector, you want the rarest."

A mioplosus in a piece of shale ranks among his most expensive items. The fish from the Green River formation measures roughly 2 feet long and sells for $2,400. What makes it rare? The 55 million-yearold fish died during seasonal rains that covered it in a fine layer of mud as it was eating another fish, which is visible hanging from its mouth.

Kingery sells another mioplosus in shale with the visible skeletal remains of two recently eaten fish in its belly. It's titled "The Last Supper."

Kingery got his start in the unusual trade after mushroom-hunting in lowa 24 years ago. He stumbled on a fossilized fern. It measured an unspectacular 2 inches in height.

"I was hooked," he says. "There was something about that fern."

Demand is a curious thing. Personal, emotional, in the eye of the beholder. Also on sale at the Tucson show are coprolites, 25 million-year-old specimens of fossilized dung. The most pricey run up to $400. Surely everyone has someone in his life who richly deserves such a gift.

Tucson-based Leo W. Banks is interested in everything having to do with fossils except becoming one. He also wrote about the dreamers of Cochise County in this issue.

Edward McCain has been fascinated by dinosaurs since childhood. He lives in Tucson.