> with how pure research budgets have been and probably will be cut, I guess they have no choice. The seller is described as a commercial paleontologist, so it

> with how pure research budgets have been and probably will be cut, I guess they have no choice. The seller is described as a commercial paleontologist, so it's not like this is a sad outcome for him and his team that they arrived at of necessity. They set out to find an expensive fossil and succeeded. The representative from Sotheby's even says that they were involved from day 1: > “This is the first time a specimen has been auctioned where we’ve been working together from the time it was excavated,” she said. “This is the most transparent sale of a dinosaur to have ever occurred.”