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Prehistoric Items Are on Auction in L.A.

Aired August 27, 2000 - 6:25 p.m. ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

BRIAN NELSON, CNN ANCHOR: Think of an auction, and paintings, and jewelry, or sculpture may come to mind. Some of those items may have a rich and a varied history. Well, how about prehistory?

CNN's Anne McDermott shows some really old items on the block in Los Angeles.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

ANNE MCDERMOTT, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): Look at these guys. Now, look at these guys. Yep, they're in love, devoted to dinos.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: I want to have a t. Rex.

MCDERMOTT (on camera): You want to have a t. Rex?

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Yes.

MCDERMOTT: Why?

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Because I want one.

MCDERMOTT (voice-over): Well, he can't have one, but he can have a sabre tooth tiger skull, or a fish fossil, or this.

DAVID HERSKOWITZ, BUTTERFIELD & BUTTERFIELD: This is actually a nest of 15 dinosaur eggs.

MCDERMOTT: These treasures are being sold through the Butterfield & Butterfield Auction House in Los Angeles along with meteorites, jewels, a prehistoric bear, an unprehistoric bat and several sharp teeth.

HERSKOWITZ: It's a collection of 197 prehistoric sharks teeth.

MCDERMOTT: Individuals found these items, items like this 200 million-year-old fossil of an early winged vertebrate, which may bring in a quarter of a million dollars.

Now, the folks at Butterfield & Butterfield say they won't sell anything that scientists haven't first had a chance to study. This fossil, for example, had been in a museum for 30 years, but museum folks say, they still don't like it. LINDA ABRAHAM, LOS ANGELES NATURAL HISTORY MUSEUM: It's like taking a jigsaw puzzle perhaps, and removing some of those pieces and putting them away in private drawers -- do you ever get the whole picture?

MCDERMOTT: A geologist says it's like hoarding great art, or...

PROF. MICHAEL WOODBURNE, UNIV. OF CALIFORNIA AT RIVERSIDE: The equivalent would be people that used to go out and hunt big game in Africa, they bring back a trophy, put it on their wall, in their den, they're very proud of it.

MCDERMOTT: Well, if that's what you want, this auction has that, too. But the Butterfield & Butterfield folks like to point out that Sue, the famous t. Rex was sold at auction and now resides in a Chicago museum.

HERSKOWITZ: Just about every natural history museum in this country originally was a private collection.

MCDERMOTT: But some may want to hold on to their dinosauria, at least a little while. We know they would.

Anne McDermott, CNN, Los Angeles.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

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