Steven Potter
Man holding a large dinosaur bone in front of glass display cases.
Craig Pfister and the brow horn from a Triceratops, left. Put it under the tree for $17,000.
As someone who regularly discovers and digs up the bones of Triceratops, Tyrannosaurus Rex and other extinct animals, Craig Pfister is living the dream of dinosaur-loving children everywhere.
He’s also managed to make a successful business out of it, delivering these painstakingly-excavated prehistoric fossils to museums and private collectors, as well as selling them in his own Madison gallery.
“I’m a commercial paleontologist,” Pfister explains, soft-spoken and nonchalant. “Because I work on the commercial side of paleontology, any federal or publicly held lands are off limits to me. I look only on private lands and I give a percentage of the sale back to the landowner.”
Raised in Wisconsin Rapids, Pfister, 58, studied geology at UW-Madison. While he fell in love with hunting for and preserving fossils from tens of millions of years ago back in college, he also knew he needed to make a living.
“After college, I looked at the career opportunities for academic paleontology and saw none, so I went over to the dark side of commercial paleontology,” he says with a smile, adding that selling his dino discoveries to private high-end collectors or museums means they’re well cared for. Some of his discoveries can be found in museums in Germany, Australia and the United Kingdom. Often his buyers will purchase a specimen and donate it or put it on long-term loans to a museum.
But not everything he finds is suitable for public display. “Some of what I find might not be complete enough or rare enough for a museum, but they’re good quality. And, it’s all material I find and prepare, which is unique — most places just resell fossils” says Pfister.
It’s those smaller, fragmented and literally fractured pieces that he sells in his gallery, Great Plains Paleontology, 1330 Williamson St.
When he started the business in the early 1990s, Pfister moved his fossil prep workshop into the basement of the Willy Street building. Cleaning and preparing his discoveries requires meticulous removal of excess rock using small tools and a hand-held sandblaster and, in some cases, applying a UV protectant. In 2016, he bought the building, which previously held the Lakeside Press cooperative, and in 2021, he opened the gallery.
“I wanted to have a bit of public outreach,” he says. “I was always this weird guy in the basement doing my prepping. I had a sign out front, but the whole building looked pretty sketchy [and some people] thought it was a drug front. So, I realized I needed to upgrade my image.”
It’s easy to miss the gallery while walking past on Willy Street. Sure, there’s a huge ulna from a woolly mammoth in the window, but let’s be honest: When was the last time you saw an actual leg bone from an extinct, elephant-ish animal? Likely never. So it might not immediately register that this is, as my 11-year-old son calls it, “a ‘dino-store.’”
Once inside it’s easy to see the shop is something very special. On a recent Saturday, a number of folks were awestruck as they walked in and discovered the enormous fossils on display.
Along one side of the shop, a few mammoth leg bones more than three feet long are set inside wooden display cases. These humerus specimens start at about $5,000 each. A femur from the almost-upright and very lizard-ish Edmontosaurus dinosaur sells for $6,000.
On the other side of the store, there are some large fossilized plant leaf specimens that were frozen in stone millions of years ago. Among them are ancient botanical remains of sassafras, sequoia and magnolia trees. Depending on size, these pieces range in price from about $200-$2,000. There’s also more Edmontosaurus bones and vertebrae for a few hundred dollars each.
In the middle of the store sits one of the paleontologist’s prized finds: A Triceratops brow horn that the herbivore used as its primary defense against predators like the T. Rex. You can take that piece home for about $17,000.
Aside from the larger items with the larger price tags, Pfister also offers gift boxes of Edmontosaurus bone bits and pieces for $45.
Steven Potter
Hands holding a large tooth.
Stuff a stocking with a T. Rex tooth.
After three decades of fossil hunting, Pfister has a couple of favorite spots he returns to each year. “They’re huge ranches in Carter County, Montana, and Hardin County, South Dakota,” he says. “The smallest one is probably 12,000 acres and the largest is about 45,000 acres. It’s just rough hillsides.”
His trips last for months at a time. “I bring all of my food and equipment and camp out. I prospect until I find something and then I excavate it,” he continues. “There’s lots of alone time. It’s not a profession for someone who doesn’t like quiet.” And, he observes, weather can be challenging: “This year there were a lot of mosquitoes. It was very rainy, very buggy.”
It also involves a lot of walking, something that has not changed in the profession since the first dinosaur fossils were discovered: “You just walk up and down hills and look for something sticking out, something different,” he says. “There’s no machine that can probe the rock — it’s not like you see on Jurassic Park. You just literally have to find it.”
Pfister, who’s found four T. Rexes and dozens of Triceratops over his career, knows what to look for and enjoys the challenge. He says it’s important work that preserves the specimens so that others can see and learn from them.
“We’re not saving them by not excavating them. It’s a myth that they would somehow be preserved for eternity,” he says, noting that fossils, once exposed to the elements, become what he calls “dinosaur gravel.”
“Once [the bones] are out in the freeze-thaw zone, they deteriorate and start breaking into little pieces in just a few years,” he says. “So that’s the irony: These things have survived 67 million years only to be destroyed in five.”
Great Plains Paleontology is open Saturdays from 11 a.m.-5 p.m., save for May through November, when Pfister is out collecting in the field. The gallery will be part of this year’s “Willy Street Wonderland” event on Saturday, Dec. 9, when it will be open from 11 a.m.-8 p.m.
