Tucson, Az

The word of the day is disappointment. I had envissioned the Rock, Mineral and Fossil show at Tucson to be some sort of magical land where dealers coffer their earthen wares at prices close to what you would pay in the region that these fossils are from; a place where I could find fantastic deals and specimens worthy of study. This was not the case.
I'll grant that there are some spectacular items here. Among these are ichthyosaurs, Psytacosaurs, Eocene bats and birds and more ammonites and trilobites than you can shake a stick at. The fact of the matter is however that everybody knows what their fossils are worth and are selling them as such. We're not talking cost of replacement, but ebay, open market price. Before I came out here I looked at people's photos from previous years. Since everything has a price tag on it, it was easy for me to guage how much I would expect to spend. It seems that the price of two of the things that I was interested in buying has close to dectupled (10 fold increase) in the last couple of years. Where photos from previous years showed Sinohydrosaurs and Keichiosaurs for below $50, with some as low as $25, the price now starts at $150 and goes up to $400 for small ones. Incidently, very small and very large specimens are worth more; as though most of these creatures consistantly died at the same age.
The thing that I've been looking all day for is lizard material. Alas, I only found one non mosasaurian lizard. It was from the Liaonang formation of China (same as sinohydrosaurus). I got a picture but didn't have time to reference anything to find out what it was. The cool thing was that it had skin impressions showing scute like scales on the tail. The only drawback was that they guy was asking $28,000.00 for it. He was only asking $25k for his complete theropods (excluding birds which were less) and about 25 hundred for psitacosaurs.
On the positive side, I did manage to get two of the largest Paleophis vertebra I've seen for free. The guy was selling mixed fossils from morocco by the pound, and the vertebrae were too light for his scale. Consiquently, he just gave them to me. Another gem of a find was a miocene snake vertebra from Florida.
I just hope that tomorrow is more rewarding.