Get the latest gossip

‘The Bones’ Review: It’s Paleontologists vs. Profit in Entertaining Look at the Fossil Trade

Jeremy Xido’s globe-trotting documentary 'The Bones' finds science outbid by private collectors in a high-stakes competition for dinosaur artifacts.

We learn that while in Canada’s Alberta province only the government can truly “own” a fossil, in many other places the rules are vague or ill-enforced enough to create a “free-for-all.” (That term is used by one expert here to describe the U.S.’s policies, or lack thereof.) Xido (“Death Metal Angola”) surveys this tangled territory with a sensibility that is equal parts early Errol Morris in its attraction towards idiosyncratic individuals, and dispassionately sleek “National Geographic”-style edutainment. Nonetheless, the film’s multinational sweep has enough ballast to leave you more concerned about the state of the prehistoric record than you were going in … and to make tens of millions of years suddenly shrink in the larger scheme of things.

Get the Android app