By Ben Marks — During Queen Victoria’s long and productive reign, from 1837 to 1901, countless buildings, books, and pieces of furniture were erected, written, and manufactured. Though the monarch did not invent Queen Anne Revival style, pen , or decree that otherwise comfortable sofas should be crowned with unyielding rims of carved hardwood, causing untold bumps on untold numbers of unsuspecting noggins, we routinely classify this varied output as Victorian Architecture, Victorian Literature, and...

Letters of the Damned: Exorcising the Curse of the Petrified Forest

By Hunter Oatman-Stanford — The letters came from everywhere—Verona, Italy; Littleton, Colorado; Oakland, California; Augsburg Germany; Sherrodsville, Ohio; Springfield, Massachusetts; Bronx, New York. They were written by children, teenagers, and adults, and while some were just a few words, others filled pages with detailed life stories. But they all shared the same sentiment: Please take back the rocks we stole. We’re sorry; we shouldn’t have done it. "I saw the letters, but I didn’t believe it and I took the...

Skeletons in Our Closets: Will the Private Market for Dinosaur Bones Destroy Us All?

By Ben Marks — When it comes to collecting, there’s old, and then there’s old. We’re not talking Mid-Century Modern old, or Victorian old, or Colonial American old, or even ancient Chinese or Egyptian old. No, we’re talking prehistory old, from the Pleistocene (11,000 to 2.5 million years ago), to the Cretaceous (66 to 145 million years ago), to the Permian (250 to 300 million years ago). "If you were a triceratops in Alberta, you had about two minutes before you got vaporized." People who want to own...