The market for dinosaur fossils is booming

In the badlands of central Montana, Clayton Phipps, a third-generation cowboy, makes his living wrangling metre-long horns. It is a lifestyle he inherited from his father and grandfather. But in Mr Phipps’s case the horns in question belong not to Montana’s herds of Angus and Hereford cattle but the three-horned dinosaur .“I describe myself as a dinosaur cowboy,” says Mr Phipps. Others would call him a commercial fossil prospector. Mr Phipps spends his time finding, digging up and preparing fossils to sell to prospective buyers. In 2006 he hit the headlines when he discovered “Duelling Dinosaurs”, the complete skeletons of a and a buried alive by a landslide while locked in a fatal embrace. Pictured above, it is perhaps the most spectacular fossil specimen ever found.