A closer look
Nicolas Cage once engaged in a furious, high-stakes bidding war against Leonardo DiCaprio over a sixty-seven-million-year-old Tyrannosaurus bataar skull, ultimately winning the auction by dropping two hundred and seventy-six thousand dollars on the prehistoric artifact. Unfortunately for Cage, it turned out the skull had been illegally smuggled out of Mongolia by a prolific fossil thief, forcing the actor to politely hand his very expensive, ancient paperweight back to the Mongolian government. There is something deeply poetic about two massively wealthy Hollywood A-listers aggressively fighting over the fossilized remains of an apex predator, only for the winner to get hit with the ultimate dose of international karmic justice. It is the kind of reckless, unhinged financial decision-making that perfectly explains why Cage eventually had to spend a decade starring in every direct-to-video action movie ever written just to pay off the IRS
