Nicola Davis

speaker

498 appearances 6 recordings 1 series first heard May 2026 last heard 18 Aug

Nicola Davis’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 6 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 3.

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Science Weekly · The ultra rich are collecting fossils, and that’s bad for science · 18 Aug 2026 podcast

the really big fossils aren't just for found loose, they're found in deposits.

And so then they need to be prepared, which some of these private collectors, you know, have spent a lot of time developing techniques and the rest of it.

So there's a lot of work involved and so the codes also recognise that to earn a living, collectors need to be able to sell.

A new thing per se, but it certainly is the case that there's big money flying around.

To the collection we've just been talking about, uh, the exact figure has not been disclosed, but uh one source said to me eight figures.

So that's big money if if that is indeed how much it has actually gone for.

Fossils have become a status symbol, I suppose, in some ways, but for private individuals.

So who exactly has been snapping them up then?

So that's interesting.

So there are some celebrity names that have gone around.

So there's Leonardo DiCaprio and Nicolas Cage got into a bidding war over a dinosaur skull, which Nicolas Cage won the the bid, but unfortunately um it turned out that this skull had left Mongolia under

Sus several circumstances and he had to return it.

That was in 2015.

But it's not always celebrities, it's not just your film stars.

There was a stegosaurus called Apex that was bought at an auction in 2024, I believe, uh held by Sotheby's.

And that was bought by a hedge fund manager who loaned it then to an American museum for four years.

And then, of course, very recently we had.

had Gus, an amazing T-Rex that was sold uh very recently, for I think it was $50.1 million dollars, US dollars.

A beautiful, uh you know, incredible object.

I mean, object really, with the number of bones involved, but something that definitely is out of the reach of most of us.

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