02/05/2024 - Jeremy Xido’s exciting, globetrotting documentary deals with dinosaur fossil excavation and trade, leading to a focus on many unexpected, intertwining topics

US filmmaker Jeremy Xido has teamed up with Canadian superstar producer Ina Fichman for an exciting, eye-opening film on dinosaur fossil excavation and trade, leading the viewer to reflect on many unexpected topics. Simply entitled The Bones, the film is showing at Hot Docs as a surprise screening.

In many ways, it is a standard investigative documentary, with numerous interviews, delivering eye-opening facts and dealing with delicate ethical and legal issues, filmed in a majestic widescreen format and edited at a fast but crystal-clear pace to a richly varied score.

We start off in Mongolia, where we meet Bolor Minjin, the first woman in a family of palaeontologists. Even though fossils in the Gobi Desert are extremely well preserved, as it hasn’t really changed since the time of the dinosaurs, there hasn’t been any governmental programme to preserve them. In 1922, an expedition from the American Museum of Natural Science discovered the skeleton of Tyrannosaurus Bataar and took it home. In 2013, Minjin convinced Mongolia’s president to request that the museum return it, and it did. This piqued the attention of “skull hunters” – commercial diggers who look for fossils and then sell them to dealers, who sell them on to collectors. These range from people from other countries who make serious money out of it, to impoverished locals for whom this is the only source of income.

The same thing is happening in the Sahara in Morocco, where we find Nizar Ibrahim in a very tight passage in a cave, demonstrating the perils of fossil digging. He recovers a large specimen and tells us that he learned about the cave from locals: “It is good to keep channels open; most big discoveries are made by amateurs.”

In Montana, we are introduced to Jack Horner, the palaeontologist that Sam Neill plays in Jurassic Park, and who was a consultant on that blockbuster. Unlike most other scientists in the field, who are happy to just find fossils and age them, Horner cracks them open in order to learn about their origin and the history of the planet. This is where the climate-change angle comes in: dinosaurs went through everything we are dealing with now, and we can see it in their bones. 

The real star of the film, though, is François Escuillié. His colleagues describe him as reckless, as he is sitting somewhere on the crossroads between science and commerce. His warehouse is full of bones waiting to be put together or sold, and his lawyer has had to save him many times. When Escuillié imported a skeleton from Mongolia, marking it properly and legally, France arrested him. A maverick figure, he seems both likeable and sneaky, and would warrant a film of his own.

The documentary zooms in on two key intertwining topics. One of these is fossil auctions, where collectors pay millions for dinosaur skeletons, something institutions can’t compete with. In 1997, the head of Sue the T-Rex was sold for $7.5 million. During filming, a 65%-complete triceratops went for $5.5 million. This ties in with the issue of colonialism and concentration of knowledge, money and power in the USA and Europe. Escuillié’s lawyer, a collector himself, with an unmistakeably arrogant air, believes the bones should be treated the same as oil.

Many other colourful protagonists provide insight and inspiration, like outspoken palaeontologist Jingmai O'Connor, and there are reasonable, straightforward explanations of how the trade and its ethics work, coming from auction expert Iacopo Brano. With all of these elements, the film really brings to life the saying that palaeontology is the “gateway drug” to science.

The Bones is a co-production between Canada’s Intuitive Pictures and Germany’s Berlin Producers, with Dogwoof handling the international rights.