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Story originally printed in the La Crosse Tribune or online at www.lacrossetribune.com

Published - Saturday, April 14, 2007

Getting cash for ancient skeleton proves to be mammoth task

KENOSHA, Wis. (AP) — Somewhere under John Hebior’s 36 acres of cornfields rest the ancient bones of at least one woolly mammoth. But the 76-year-old retiree doesn’t plan to excavate the fossils quite yet.

“I’d like to sell this one first,” he said, gesturing to about 20 boxes containing the carefully packed bones of a second mammoth unearthed from those fields 13 years ago.

Unfortunately, turning the cold hard fossils into cold hard cash has proved to be a mammoth task. The small pool of potential buyers includes museums and universities, traditionally cash-strapped institutions that can’t easily afford the $100,000 or more he hopes to get for them.

For Hebior, the experience illustrates the challenge of getting full financial value for artifacts whose value is more scientific than commercial.

The Hebior mammoth is about 90 percent intact with minor fragments missing from a foot and elsewhere, said David Overstreet, who helped excavate the fossils in 1994 from Hebior’s farm in the Town of Paris in southeastern Wisconsin.

“It’s an extraordinary specimen because of its completeness,” said Overstreet, 64, an adjunct professor of anthropology at Marquette University in Milwaukee. The specimen is about 13 feet high and 12,500 years old, he said.

The Milwaukee Public Museum approached Hebior about a month ago to inquire about the skeleton, Hebior said, adding that he hopes the museum can acquire the bones to keep them near where they were found. But the museum’s interest is only exploratory, said spokeswoman Ellen Burmeister.

“This is very much a preliminary plan,” she said. “Because of our financial situation now, it would have to be completely sponsored” by a benefactor or corporate donor.

The Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago would be interested, but the museum rarely pays for ancient artifacts, said William Simpson, who manages its collection of fossil vertebrates.

“I wouldn’t say we would never pay, but it would be unusual,” he said. “We like to collect specimens ourselves because we know exactly where they came from, how they were found. That’s just as important as having the fossil.”

Hebior said he didn’t need the tax deduction he could get from donating the skeleton. With four grandchildren entering college in the next five years, he planned to hold out for the best cash offer, he said.

Richard Slaughter, director of the geology museum at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said his museum is lucky to afford its full-time staff of one, much less to procure “all-star specimens” such as the Hebior mammoth.

“If I had the money available, I’d prefer to use it to pay for students to go out and collect things for the museum,” Slaughter said. “It’s cheaper for us and the students get the educational benefit.”

Museums also hesitate to pay for artifacts that may not get displayed. The Field Museum has so much inventory that more than 99.5 percent remains in storage instead of on display, Simpson said.

The American Museum of Natural History in New York also has most of its collection out of public view. Only about 40 percent of the museum’s area is devoted to public exhibition space, said spokesman Steve Reichl.

Those remaining artifacts aren’t gathering dust — scientists frequently use them for research, Simpson said.

Placing a dollar value on fossils is dicey because the real value is whatever the market will bear, said Dan Damrow, a commercial fossil supplier in Mosinee, Wis. He estimated the Hebior mammoth would fetch $150,000 to $250,000, though he said the market had become saturated in recent years after Russia loosened restrictions on sales of its abundant mammoth fossils from Siberia.

Private collectors make up a small but impassioned market, but most prefer manageable specimens such as a single tusk or tooth, he said. Few collectors would have the space to house Hebior’s 13-foot-tall mammoth skeleton.

“Maybe a commercial entity would buy it — maybe a bank could put it in its lobby and advertise that it has ’mammoth deals,“’ he suggested.

No thanks, said Hebior, noting that he would only sell the bones as an intact specimen and only to a research institution.

A number of purported mammoth and dinosaur bones are offered on eBay, from a mammoth’s toe bone offered for $75 to a triceratops skull and skeleton for $65,000. Fossil suppliers say auction sites are viable for selling individual bones, but rarely for skeletons worth five or six figures.

Hebior’s son, David, was plowing a field in the 1970s when he turned up a canteloupe-sized object. John Hebior, a retired railroad-station agent, showed it to Overstreet in 1993 as Overstreet excavated a different mammoth about half a mile away. Overstreet recognized it as a fossil and searched Hebior’s land, stumbling across the Hebior mammoth. Tests showed the original fossil was from a different mammoth, one whose skeleton still presumably remains to be uncovered.

Hebior hopes the Milwaukee museum can find a corporate sponsor to underwrite his mammoth’s cost. That’s what Chicago’s Field Museum did in 2000 when McDonald’s Corp. and Walt Disney World Resort helped sponsor the $8.36 million cost of Sue, the largest and most complete tyrannosaurus rex skeleton known.

Hebior is in no hurry to sell his mammoth. Eventually, a museum will acquire the funding to buy it, he predicted.

While Overstreet hopes Hebior gets fair market value for the mammoth, he cautions backyard paleontologists that the commercial market for fossils is limited.

“Nobody’s going to be getting rich selling mammoth bones,” he said.