A Roaring Trade
On a quiet, leafy road in Singapore’s upscale Upper Thomson district sits what appears to be a conventional family home. But anyone who steps through the front door is in for a shock—it’s like stumbling into Jurassic Park.
“I have more than 1,000 fossils in my collection,” says Calvin Chu, a partner at consulting firm Eden Strategy Institute. An enormous skull of a prognathodon giganteus—a 10-metre-long, prehistoric marine reptile that looks like a cross between a whale and a crocodile—sits next to his dining table. Rows of custom-built cabinets house artefacts that include the tooth of a tyrannosaurus rex, and a 4.4 billion-year-old rock, one of the world’s oldest.
“Some collectors are proud of ‘taming’ a prehistoric beast that sits on their mantle,” says Chu. “But for myself, standing at the foot of a giant dinosaur or a ferocious ancient predator humbles me, and gives me perspective on how trivial the day-to-day issues we may be dealing with might be. I guess when astronomers contend with the vastness of space, it is a very similar
