psittacosaurus psale

[Nicholas R Longrich <longrich@alumni.princeton.edu>]

I can't say I have arrived at any sort of firm conclusions with respect to 
these difficult issues, so I'm not going to argue one way or the other, but I 
think I see some inconsistencies here so I'm going to play devil's advocate: if 
you're going to bitch about paying 200,000 dollars for a unique and 
scientifically interesting specimen of cf. Psittacosaurus as legitimizing 
commercial trade in fossils and commercializing the field, you should 
definitely be complaining even more loudly about a museum going in with 
megacorporations like McDonalds and Disney and paying 8,000,000 dollars for a 
dinosaur whose only real points of interest are that it's (a) close to complete 
and pretty well-preserved ( although many other dinosaurs such as the RTMP 
Gorgosaurus wall mount are similar in preservation and the family as a whole is 
very well represented by fossil material) (b) real, real big (can't argue 
here); and (c) of the generic name (or perhaps brand name?) Tyrannosaurus.