#11
The Globe and Mail (Canada)
February 6, 2002
Gnawed to the bone
The dinosaur industry is big business. But while Canadians are currently enjoying Russia's finest specimens, the museums back home are having to do without.
GEOFFREY YORK investigates how Moscow's collections are dying out
By GEOFFREY YORK

MOSCOW -- The Russian schoolchildren are gaping at a towering skeleton of a tyrannosaurus, its teeth bared menacingly. It seems a ferocious and terrifying creature -- until the museum guide admits it is only a copy.

"We have two originals of this dinosaur," she tells the Russian students. "One is in Canada now. The other is in the United States."

The display cases of Moscow's paleontology museum are littered with empty stands and scraps of paper with written apologies for the absences of dinosaur skeletons. Dozens of the museum's unique discoveries have been touring for years in foreign cities, including Toronto, where promoters are exploiting the Western fascination with huge prehistoric creatures in the era of Hollywood blockbusters such as Jurassic Park.

Dinosaurs are big business, especially in a country like Russia where controls are lax and corruption is widespread. And now a small group of entrepreneurs has managed to seize control of Russia's dinosaurs, stripping the assets of the Moscow paleontology institute and exhibiting many of the most unusual skeletons in lucrative foreign markets.

It doesn't leave much for Russian aficionados to enjoy. "I don't understand why they had to take away so many things," muttered Alexander Zavadsky, a Moscow engineer, as he walked through the museum with his wife on a recent afternoon. "There are too many vacant spots here. Most of the objects are poor-quality copies. There should be more for Russians to see in our museums."

Moscow's paleontology institute can boast one of the world's richest collections of dinosaur skeletons, fossils, skulls, eggs, mammoth tusks and a vast array of other remains from the awesome creatures that lived millions of years ago. The 200-year-old collection is the product of decades of research by Soviet and Russian scientists who hunted patiently through the deserts of Mongolia and other dinosaur hotbeds.

A few years ago, however, some shrewd businessmen realized that the fossils were a commercial goldmine. Dinosaurs had captured the Western imagination, and the Russian collection was one of the best sources of the real stuff.

Since then, the gaps in the Moscow museum have grown steadily bigger. Russian scientists are worried that their one-of-a-kind specimens could be damaged by the constant strain of packing, unpacking, shipping, loading, unloading and public display in cities around the world, from Australia and Japan to California and Kansas, and now to Toronto, where the Royal Ontario Museum has borrowed the Russian dinosaur skeletons for its own exhibit of Great Asian Dinosaurs. (The ROM announced on Friday that the exhibition helped push the museum's attendance levels to record levels in December and January.)

An even greater worry is the growing number of gaps in the backroom storage cabinets of the Moscow Paleontological Institute, where a series of mysterious thefts has triggered allegations of insider corruption.

When a group of Western scholars tried to investigate the wave of fossil thefts, they say they were obstructed by the institute's top directors. They also alleged that most of the thefts were never reported to the police.

The scholars concluded that the thefts were organized by a well-connected group of insiders at the institute. But nobody was ever arrested for the thefts, and most of the stolen fossils were never recovered.

The institute's vice-president, Igor Novikov, says the institute is being "persecuted" by a "group of slanderers." He says the institute halted its co-operation with the international working group because one of the Western scholars was illegally refusing to return a borrowed object from the institute (a charge that the scholars deny). He also insists that the institute reported all of the thefts to the police and managed to recover some of the missing objects.

The flow of money generated by the Russian fossils is continuing to rise, with revenue spun from the exhibits and related merchandise. But Russian scientists say they are ignored when they ask for an accounting for the cash. In an opaque structure of deals, the money seems to go to private intermediaries.

The intermediaries in the ROM exhibit are companies called the International Academic Agency (NAUKA) and the Pleiades Media Group. Pleiades is headed by Alexander Shustorovich, a wealthy 35-year-old Russian-American businessman with a flashy lifestyle who owns homes in Paris and New York. He is also the co-founder of NAUKA.

NAUKA has close links to the institute, yet its revenue is privately controlled. Russian newspapers have reported that NAUKA's deputy director is the daughter of the institute's director, one of the officials accused by the Western scholars of blocking investigations into the fossil thefts.

The same company is now seeking to represent other Russian scientific institutes in their foreign exhibits. Most have refused.

Despite the heavy flow of cash generated by the dinosaur business, little of the money is trickling down to the researchers who form the backbone of Moscow's paleontological institute.

Larisa Doguzhayeva, a scholar who has worked for 23 years at the institute as a specialist in ammonites (prehistoric mollusks), gets a monthly salary of less than $100. She has no access to the Internet, she has to pay for her own printer ink and paper, and she cannot get funds for train trips into the Russian provinces to dig for fossils.

Doguzhayeva and other Russian scientists have emerged as leading critics of the institute's bosses. They say the institute's income from foreign museums has declined drastically since NAUKA gained control of its exhibits. In a letter in 1998, seven of its scientists said the institute is secretly privatizing its fossils and concealing thefts from its collections.

For the past five years, the scientists have repeatedly asked the institute to account for the money from the exhibits, but they say they have never received a reply.

"It's huge money," Doguzhayeva says. "Our best specimens are shown in other countries, and NAUKA has a monopoly on all [the institute's] exhibits. How are they using this money? They aren't using it to support productive researchers."

The Royal Ontario Museum refuses to say how much it paid to NAUKA for the right to display the dinosaurs, although it says the fees were "consistent with normal international exhibit fees."

Other sources say the money can be substantial. Museums and exhibit organizers are reportedly paying up to $50,000 a month for Russian dinosaur collections. Just one of the Moscow institute's best-preserved skeletons, a Saurolophus angustirostris, has an estimated value of $15-million. (It is currently on display at the ROM exhibit.) Even the copies, which are sometimes sold during exhibits, are worth thousands of dollars.

The stolen fossils are also highly valuable, especially by the standards of poorly paid Russian scientists. A skeleton of a giant prehistoric lizard, which disappeared from the institute and later surfaced in Japan, is worth an estimated $750,000.

Problems first emerged with a series of thefts in the early 1990s. Dozens of valuable specimens -- including 27 prehistoric skulls, several dinosaur skeletons, mammoth tusks and remains of the extinct cave bear -- disappeared from the institute without any signs of break-ins or forced entry. By some estimates, the specimens were worth more than $1.5-million. At the same time, Western scholars noticed that similar specimens were being offered for sale by private dealers outside Russia.

In 1992, a German scientist discovered a 240-million-year-old amphibian skull which had mysteriously gone onto the market in Germany. He borrowed the skull from the dealer and took it to his office. When he examined the skull under special lighting, he found a partially erased catalogue number from the Moscow institute.

The scientist insisted that the skull should be returned to the institute. Curiously, however, the institute's directors resisted the idea, although later they grudgingly agreed to the return of the skull.

In 1994, scientists formed an international working group to hunt for the stolen fossils and return them to the Moscow institute. Among the members were scholars from Britain, France, Germany, Japan and the United States.

After compiling a long list of stolen skulls and other fossils, the group tracked down the dealers who were selling the fossils and, in some cases, established that the dealers had links to the Moscow institute. The group also discovered that the robbers were able to bypass the institute's alarm system. It charged that the institute's bosses were concealing information on the thefts, denying the thefts, refusing to report the incidents to the police, and denying the commercial activities of its own officials.

"Numerous lines of evidence point to an organized group operating within PIN (the paleontology institute), with direct access to PIN collections, well-developed contacts with foreign commercial dealers and the facility to move stolen items through Russian customs," the international group said in a 1997 report.

Beginning in 1991, the institute's collections "have been systematically pillaged by a well-organized group consisting largely, or entirely, of PIN personnel," the group added.

Because the institute's top officials refused to co-operate with the investigation, the international group was eventually forced to suspend its work. One of its members, Cincinnati paleontologist Glenn Storrs, says the directors were "nothing but obstructive" to the group's efforts to investigate the thefts and return the stolen fossils.

Critics charge that too many fossils are being declared "scientifically worthless," allowing them to be legally exported and sold on foreign markets for thousands of dollars.

Doguzhayeva recalls how the Russian Ministry of Culture asked her to examine a collection of 12,000 ammonites from Russia's Volga River region last year. She concluded that the fossils were beautifully preserved and warranted scientific study. But she was stunned to learn that the paleontological institute had already certified that the ammonites were scientifically worthless and could be exported.

In another incident in 1996, she was visited by a German fossil dealer and a former institute scientist who had created a private fossil dealership. She says they offered to buy a large collection of ammonites that she had recently gathered in field research. "Larisa, don't you want to have German marks?" she remembers them asking her.

Doguzhayeva says she refused to sell the ammonites because they were state property. But when she returned from a conference in Spain a few weeks later, she found that the collection had disappeared from an office drawer. There was no sign of forced entry, and she says asked the institute to report the theft to police and they did not.

The same German fossil dealer who tried to sell the stolen amphibian skull in 1992 that started the investigation by the Western scientists has enjoyed a close relationship with the institute for the past decade. He was arrested in 1998 at a Russian border post when he tried to enter Finland with a van loaded with half a tonne of Russian fossils. Officials said he had documents for only a third of the fossils. But the investigation was eventually dropped and the dealer was released.

In recent years, the number of thefts seems to have declined, while the institute has expanded its involvement in lucrative foreign exhibits. Some Russian scientists are worried that the institute is making money from exhibits that can endanger unique dinosaur skeletons, some of which are holotypes -- the basic reference specimens for different species, usually the first-discovered specimens. They argue that these specimens should be kept in carefully protected rooms in Moscow.

"These objects, some of which are millions of years old, are very vulnerable and fragile," says Vladimir Zhegalo, a former institute scientist who now serves as an expert at the Russian Culture Ministry. "Changes of temperature and humidity can affect them, and X-raying at customs points can ruin them. In some cases, bones have broken up on the way from the institute to the customs offices."

Novikov accuses Zhegalo of being "prejudiced against the institute." He says the institute is taking "all possible measures" to avoid damage during transportation, including the use of special equipment and packing material.

For its part, the ROM is "always very concerned" about the safe transportation and handling of its exhibits, according to spokesman Francisco Alvarez. "The specimens were expertly packed, and will be repacked, by technicians and scientists from the paleontological institute," he said.

As for the danger of damage when the dinosaur skeletons are unpacked by customs officials, this is "a normal hazard involved with any international exhibition of artifacts or specimens," he said.

The museum says it doesn't know what NAUKA does with the revenue from the Toronto exhibit, but it believes that by presenting the dinosaur exhibit the ROM is "supporting the paleontological institute." The exhibit also allows scholarly exchanges between Russian and Western scientists, which are "a significant benefit" to the institute, the museum says.

Alvarez said the museum has no comment on the allegations of corruption at the paleontological institute. He said the museum's senior curator, Hans Sues, has had "excellent relationships" with many Russian scientists for two decades and he is only aware of a single theft at the institute many years ago.