The Fossil Bid
A drafty auction barn in rural Wyoming at 7:14 PM, where folding chairs face a plywood stage and a tarp-covered something the size of a pickup truck is drawing murmurs from eleven bidders and one paleontologist who won't stop pacing.
A rancher outside Thermopolis plowed up what appears to be a near-complete Triceratops skull on his property last spring, and tonight he's auctioning it with no reserve to settle a divorce. The opening bid is $85,000. Double and Bust have pooled exactly $211,000 — every satoshi they've liquidated — but the paleontologist from the Museum of the Rockies keeps whispering into her phone, and two men in the back row haven't blinked since the tarp came off. The skull's provenance paperwork is a single notarized letter from the rancher's soon-to-be-ex-wife, and the auction catalog lists the species as 'probable Triceratops horridus (unverified).'
“Unverified means undiscovered means we name it. Double and Bust, immortalized in a museum. You can't put a price on that — but if you could, it's way more than 211k.”
“We have a notarized letter from a woman who's selling this to hurt her husband, a species ID with the word 'probable' in it, and you want to bet our entire net worth that eleven strangers are all wrong about what this is worth?”
The paleontologist's phone died mid-bid, the two men in back turned out to be divorce lawyers fighting over who got the ranch's mineral rights, and Double won the skull at $194,000. Six weeks later, a University of Montana prep team uncovered a previously unknown healed bite mark from a juvenile T. rex — making it one of maybe five known specimens showing direct predator interaction — and the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles bought it for $2.1 million, with the sole condition that the donor plaque read whatever Double wanted.
The plaque says 'Donated by Double & Bust — One of Whom Believed.'
We were $2,500 from bankruptcy and he's acting like he planned the part where the paleontologist had Sprint.