MY PRIVATE DINOSAUR

Owning a giant skeleton of a T-Rex to adorn the living room of your castle on the Loire or your mansion in Beijing is considered the new trend among the affluent.

The market of dinosaurs is made of professionals that search for skeletons, firms that get authorizations and companies who take care of the excavations, the cleaning, the reassembling, conditioning and then bring the beast to the attention of potential clients.

Dinosaurs and the remains of other prehistoric animals are present in many countries but researches concentrate on places where authorizations are easy and those who find are those that own. It is mainly in the USA.

Private fossil collectors are pretty common these days all over the world. Some are serious enough to pass for professional paleontologists. Others seem mainly to be indulging a boyish taste for big, scary and expensive monsters.

Big skeletons can easily go for millions of Euros.

I photographed the entire process. From the research and recovery in Montana and South Dakota, the reconstruction in a hangar in Italy, the auction in Paris and then a series of portraits of the collectors with their ancient trophies, in various countries.

(This project was made in collaboration with photographer Juri De Luca)