British Collector Donates Rare T-Rex Skeleton to Tel Aviv Museum Amid Controversy

The Steinhardt Natural History Museum at Tel Aviv University announced it will receive a rare Tyrannosaurus rex skeleton donated by British businessman Martin Jenkins. The museum described the T-Rex as a unique specimen in the Middle East, valuable for both scientific research and public exhibition. However, a Bloomberg Businessweek investigation revealed troubling details about Jenkins' dealings in the dinosaur fossil market, which is largely unregulated and has recently seen record-breaking sales, including a T-Rex sold for $50.1 million at Sotheby's.

Jenkins, who presents himself as a philanthropic collector aiming to educate children and display fossils in museums, is at the center of a network involving canceled sales, questionable scientific reports, and legal threats against academics and journalists who questioned his fossils. In 2022, a planned auction of a T-Rex named "Tooth" at Christie's Hong Kong was canceled after experts identified it as a copy of another famous T-Rex skeleton called "Stan," which had sold for $31.8 million. The owner of the intellectual property rights to Stan threatened copyright lawsuits.

Further scrutiny uncovered multiple scientific reports linked to Jenkins that appeared fabricated, with identical formatting and repeated authorship by two researchers, David Burnham and John Nade, who denied authorship of unpublished reports. Museums have frozen exhibitions after discovering suspicious similarities between fossils and their documentation. Attempts to investigate Jenkins' activities have been met with lawsuits and gag orders, including a $90 million threat against an archaeologist and legal injunctions blocking media coverage.

Jenkins claims to own only three T-Rex skeletons held in charitable trusts forbidding commercial sale, with one intended for the Tel Aviv museum. Despite his philanthropic claims, sources familiar with recent transactions say Jenkins tried to sell T-Rex skeletons for about $35 million each to wealthy collectors. The Steinhardt Museum welcomes the donation but has not publicly addressed the allegations raised by Bloomberg. The case highlights the murky and controversial nature of the high-value dinosaur fossil market.