LONDON

An undergraduate palaeontology student from Texas, who caused controversy last month by trying to sell a Tyrannosaurus rex skeleton through the World Wide Web, has caused a further stir by selling a hominid skull and jawbones to an undisclosed university in Europe.

Jim Wyatt, a student at the University of Texas, Dallas, owns Fossilnet, an electronic ‘supermarket’ of fossils. Earlier this month, he put pictures on his website of what are believed to be Cro-Magnon and Neanderthal human remains from Italy, including a skull (right) valued at US$28,000.

The European university, which has a large department of palaeoanthropology, is believed to have struck a deal at the start of the month. The skull and seven other items were jointly priced at $94,000. But Wyatt says the university paid “substantially below the asking price”.

The items are part of a private collection that once belonged to an Italian fossil hunter, Frederic Zambelli Hosmer. They are believed to have been excavated in the 1920s and '30s, and sold by Zambelli to finance his explorations.

Last month, Wyatt angered members of the Society for Vertebrate Paleontology by using as the showpiece item of his website a virtually complete — and still unsold — privately owned skeleton of T. rex with a price of $12 million.

His decision to sell human remains “is just going too far”, says Eric Scott, palaeontology field supervisor at the San Bernardino County Museum in California. “Many people have objected to the sale of dinosaur skeletons. But selling human material is just frightening. And there's so little of it around.”

Wyatt claims to earn less than $50,000 a year, mostly by brokering small-scale deals between private collectors and museums and universities. “What I'm doing is totally legal, and no different to any other business,” he says.

Buying and selling fossils brought legally from another country is permitted in the United States, as is fossil collection on private land. A proposed bill — the Fossil Preservation Act of 1996 — would even permit commercial fossil collection on public land.

The Society for Vertebrate Paleontology is opposed to this, as is the public. A clear majority of respondents to a survey conducted two years ago said they believed fossils found on public or private land should belong to public institutions (see Nature 379, 388; 1996).

An associated organization, Save America's Fossils for Everyone (SAFE), has drafted its own fossil-preservation proposals as a draft Senate bill.