Check Out These T-Rex Bone Dice... But They'll Cost You!

If you have some spare cash to burn, you can back a crowdfunding project for polyhedral gaming dice made out of genuine T-Rex bone fossils. They're not cheap, though!

The bone is, apparently, ethically sourced--coming from "scraps and broken fragments" not used by museums or scientists. The dice come in three different styles (and prices!); the most expensive option is a set of dice carved from solid bone, which will set you back a whopping $599. Cheaper options include "bone inclusions", which are fossil fragments suspended in the center of clear dice, at $99; or pulverized bone, which is blended with resin, for $69. Those are for full dice sets, of course--you can also grab single dice if you don't want to splash out that much cash. Delivery is in July 2026.

In addition to the dice, the Kickstarter also offers 1:12 scale dinosaur replica skulls, 1:53 scale full replica skeletons, and fancy dice cases and stands.

 

[EternalDungeonMaster]

These are scientifically unusable fragments and discards.

There is a local restaurant that sometimes serves "wagyu hotdogs." What makes them wagyu hotdogs? They contain ground up scraps that are castoffs when wagyu beef is cut up into salable pieces.

These dice are the same thing.

 

[Deset Gled]

These are scientifically unusable fragments and discards.

Repeating that fact again does not address the concerns shared above.

 

[EternalDungeonMaster]

Repeating that fact again does not address the concerns shared above.

And amplifying artificially-created reasons for being offended by a business venture does not create an actual problem.

 

[Deset Gled]

And amplifying artificially-created reasons for being offended by a business venture does not create an actual problem.

 

[sevenbastard]

Im not directly related to this project, but I am on a team of time travelers who travel to the Cretaceous period to help the ultra rich hunt t-rexs.

I struggled at first with the ethics of it, but it paid really well because of the risk and I needed a job.

We use the meat for a banquet and most of the bones are repressed into souvenir items. Realistically the biggest impact is the energy used to power the time gate, but they use hydro from a dam (located near the under ground facility) so I feel less bad about it.

To not over hunt we never go to the same decade twice so one TRex every 10 years isn't going to make a big difference.

 

[EternalDungeonMaster]

Im not directly related to this project, but I am on a team of time travelers who travel to the Cretaceous period to help the ultra rich hunt t-rexs.

I struggled at first with the ethics of it, but it paid really well because of the risk and I needed a job.

We use the meat for a banquet and most of the bones are repressed into souvenir items. Realistically the biggest impact is the energy used to power the time gate, but they use hydro from a dam (located near the under ground facility) so I feel less bad about it.

To not over hunt we never go to the same decade twice so one TRex every 10 years isn't going to make a big difference.

It's God's work you guys are doing.

 

[Willie the Duck]

I'll admit this set off some alarm bells in my brain the same way the phrase 'ethically sourced teak' does. However, I'm having a hard time coming up with a credible scenario where this would actually be an issue. It is post-science cast-off rock material. It's not precious scientific or cultural knowledge destroyed because I'm financing a 19th century _____-ologist who does his scientific acquisition using dynamite or the like.

What is does come off as, after the alarm bells have stopped ringing, is try-hard, combined with competitive marketing playing off FOMO and manufactured cred. Like, I get it -- when they first started becoming available, I got a set of solid brass gaming dice (to have a set of 'brass ones'). It felt like a fun little joke, and maybe a bit of a financial indication of my devotion to my hobby (I was spending $50-100, back when that was more of a commitment than now, to indicate how much gaming meant to me). And honestly it was less of an expenditure and more practical than those Damascus steel straight razors and barrel aged whiskeys and mother of pearl handled pocket knives non-gaming magazines were trying to tell me would prove I was a manly man of sophistication.

It's just that, 20+ years on, everyone else who likes to make money has caught on, and every time I go to r/RPGs or the like, I get another banner ad for brass or 14-k gold or rose quartz dice I can carry in a faux dragon hide dice bag and roll on my ethically sourced teak' gaming table with black-lipped mother of pearl inlay that costs more than my first car. And now the dice are made of T-rex bones, but next year it will be moon rocks. And you better get some, cause this is a limited time offer, and we're going to imply that the guy over there totally is in on the deal (he's getting the upscaled version), and you wouldn't want anyone to think that he was more into gaming than you were?

That's obviously hyperbole. Still, 20+ years on, the brass dice are... somewhere (I think a cigar box with other things vaguely precious to me, but not worth putting in the safety deposit box). They aren't really good for gaming (shouldn't roll them on many surfaces) and they certainly don't win the game for me. Certainly no one is noticing that I have them and thinking, "wow, he's a gamer amongst gamers." Nor did they make Jenny Anderson retroactively agree to go to the prom with me or whatever it is that makes us seek out those manliness indicators. And every time I see another one of these -- we'll call them gamer consumerism one-upsmanship items -- I just think it's the same thing as those brass dice sets for a new generation.

 

[Morrus]

but next year it will be moon rocks.

It will be very hard for me to resist that.

 

[Tigris]

These are scientifically unusable fragments and discards.

There is a local restaurant that sometimes serves "wagyu hotdogs." What makes them wagyu hotdogs? They contain ground up scraps that are castoffs when wagyu beef is cut up into salable pieces.

These dice are the same thing.

Wagyu beef is not a limited ressource.

Wagyu beef's main purpose even is being eaten.


Also something which might not be useable today, can be useable in 5 or 10 years by science.


Like metal "scraps" from old sunken ships which suddenly became important in science.

Or to bring the example of a toy: Helium.
Helium becomes more and more important for science and is being used up for toy baloons.

 

[MGibster]

hat's obviously hyperbole. Still, 20+ years on, the brass dice are... somewhere (I think a cigar box with other things vaguely precious to me, but not worth putting in the safety deposit box).

I used to buy novelty dice every once in a while, nothing made out of dinosaur bones of course, but it didn't take long for the novelty to wear thin. I have a set of metal dice I never use because I don't want to risk denting the table I play on. There are other novelty dice that are oddly shaped 4 or 6 siders that I don't use because they're more difficult to read than standard dice.

OTOH, there is an argument that there is no such thing as "ethically sourced" for certain materials. Merely creating a market for it to be sold is being part of the problem. Can anybody weigh in on the supply status of T-rex fossils? Is this a Victorian mummy situation, or just less than common rocks?

Does this apply Does this apply to all fossils? A few years ago I happened upon a rather inexpensive trilobite at a rock shop in Colorado. These suckers survived in our oceans for approximately 270,000,000 years and left behind such numerous fossilized remains that you can buy them for $5 at tourist traps. This is a good specimen, so it cost me a lot more than $5. What about megalodon teeth? I've got some of those.

And there where many artifacts which years after their discovery became really useful because new scientific techniques were developed to analyze them.

Which presents another problem. There are so many pottery sherds in places like the Smithsonian Museum that storage is a serious problem. The majority of the sherds are useless for research purposes because their provenance is either unknown or dicey at best, but they're preserved because it seems wrong to destroy them and there's some hope maybe we'll be able to use them for useful research in the future. At some point, we're going to run out of space or we're not going to have the funds to keep storing them.

Let's talk about the ethics of even digging these things up for scientific research. It was impressed upon me as an undergraduate that archaeology was inherently destructive. No matter how careful you were, no matter how well you catalogued, you were destroying the site. Maybe if we wait long enough we'll have the technology to investigate underground without destroying the site.

And here in the United States at least, there are other considerations. If I find a T-Rex on my property it belongs to me. i.e. It's just as much my property as any other rock I dig out of the ground. I'm free to do with it whatever I want.