Sell a specimen legally

1. Check the legality flag on the record. Material casually collected on US federal land cannot be sold or traded, ever. Vertebrate material from federal land cannot be owned privately. Fossils from China, Mongolia, Brazil and Argentina, Alberta material without a disposition certificate, and Moroccan dinosaur material without an export certificate should not be sold. Stratum's Market gate reads the land status and the country and stops the listing; do not override it without a document.

2. Check the material. Modern shells and corals on the CITES appendices, and ivory of any kind, are regulated; mammoth ivory is banned for sale in several US states and by eBay and Etsy. A fossil dealer with a modern nautilus shell or a walrus tusk in stock is a wildlife trader for that item.

3. Write the disclosure: repair, restoration (location and percentage), composite, treatment, and the identification with its confidence. The AAPS code requires it, the Munich Show requires it on the label, eBay's fossil rules ask for it, and a buyer who was told in writing has no claim. The record's Preparation tab prints it on the card, the certificate and the listing.

4. Assemble the paperwork that goes with the piece: the landowner agreement or quarry receipt, the export and import documents, the prior owner's label and receipt, and the certificate of authenticity from the record. A specimen that ships with a folder sells for more than one that ships with a story.

5. Price from comparables — ended listings with the same locality and quality, dealer sites, auction results — and write the price basis on the record for your own reference and for the insurer.

6. Sales tax: a dealer selling at a show collects the show state's sales tax and needs a temporary or permanent registration there; a collector selling occasionally may be under the threshold, but the marketplaces collect on their platforms anyway. Income: sales of collectibles are taxable income (in the US, collectibles held over a year are taxed at the collectibles capital-gains rate; dealers report on Schedule C), and barter is income at fair market value. Keep the cost basis on the record.

7. Ship as the fragile-specimen how-to describes, with insurance, and keep the record of the sale — buyer, price, date, certificate number — so the provenance chain has your link in it.

Sources

Cite this article

Stratum Study. "Sell a specimen legally" (How-to). Stratum Study pack 2026.09, as of 2026-09-16. https://stratum.black/study/how-to/sell-a-specimen-legally. Accessed 2026-09-20.

BibTeX · CSL-JSON

@misc{stratum-sell-a-specimen-legally,
  title        = {Sell a specimen legally},
  author       = {{Stratum Study}},
  howpublished = {\url{https://stratum.black/study/how-to/sell-a-specimen-legally}},
  year         = {2026},
  note         = {How-to article, Stratum Study pack 2026.09, as of 2026-09-16; sources: stratum. Accessed 2026-09-20.}
}

Citations carry the pack version and the article's as-of date so they resolve to the same text later. The facts themselves belong to the sources listed below; cite those for the science.