[Author’s Note: I’m out in the field at Dinosaur National Monument this week, but when I come back next Tuesday I’ll be hosting the paleo blog carnival I started way back when – The Boneyard. I’ve picked sabertooths as the theme for this edition, but feel free to send me any paleo posts you would like featured when the link-fest goes up next week. In the meantime, here’s a repost of one of my recent sabercat essays.]

How does one go about selling a sabercat skeleton? This was the question the Argentinean naturalist Francisco Javier Muñiz asked Charles Darwin in a letter sent on August 30, 1846.

Almost one year previously, in the pages of the Gaceta Mercantil,