I'm a professional DINOSAUR hunter and I get paid to find rare fossils trends now

If you're obsessed with Jurassic Park, then you might love the idea of hunting dinosaurs for a living. 

But this real-life fossil hunter says that his job isn't for the faint-of-heart.

Whether he's braving the blazing sun of the ominously named Hell Creek Formation, or dodging floods to retrieve T-Rex skulls, no one can say that Anthony Maltese has opted for a cushy job.

As curator for the Rocky Mountain Dinosaur Resource Center (RMDRC) in Colorado, Mr Maltese splits his time between digging for dinosaurs in the field and carefully preparing specimens for display in museums and private collections across the world.

In the 'dig season' between late March all the way through to late November, Mr Maltese might spend up to two weeks living out of a tent deep in the deserts of North Dakota or Montana.

'It's not comfortable,' he told MailOnline, 'especially when you only have one shower a week in some of the places we work.'

'When we drive up to Montana, it's 12 hours in the back of a pickup truck just to get to the site. Then when the gnats, and the mosquitos and ticks are all biting you, it can be pretty miserable out there.'

Neither, as Mr Maltese explained, does all this misery come cheap.

'When I was in academia 25 years ago, we were budgeting $10,000 a week to run a field programme. Nowadays we'll drop $20-25,000 a week just going out and looking for dinosaurs.'

Mr Maltese is employed by a RMDRC and Triebold Paleontology, a commercial fossil collector founded by Mike Triebold, to collect new specimens and make casts to sell to collectors.

Prospective buyers can approach Triebold Paleontology to source rare fossils - with some costing hundreds of thousands of dollars.

From dedicated fossil quarries in the heart of the USA to dog walkers on the beaches of England's Jurassic coast; collectors and museums alike rely on private individuals to fill their shelves with new specimens.

Tyrannosaurus Rex bones in particular have commanded extraordinary prices at auction in recent years, with a T-Rex skeleton made up of three different specimens fetching $6.1m (£4.9m) at an auction this April.

Other dinosaurs have been sold for even more outstanding prices.

In 2020, the skull of Stan the T-Rex broke the record for the most expensive fossil ever sold when it went for $31.8m (£25.5m) to a mysterious bidder, later revealed to have been Abu Dhabi museum.

Here in the UK, in 2014 the Natural History Museum enlisted the help of 69 private donors to acquire the world's most complete Stegosaurus.

'Sophie', which was purchased from the Red Canyon Ranch in Wyoming, is even believed to be named after the daughter of the wealthy hedge fund manager who made the purchase possible.

Mr Maltese, alongside the team at Triebold Palaeontology, collects specimens as well as producing casts and replicas for sale at lower prices, but says that around 90% of their customers are museums.

How much an individual dinosaur specimen will sell for varies depending on the species as well as the condition and completeness of the find.

Sometimes, Mr Maltese says that the fossils are sold for just enough to pay back the landowner and cover costs, while others will go for 'hundreds of thousands of dollars'.

However, Mr Maltese says neither himself, nor anyone he works with is in this for the money.

'When you consider a 30ft long Triceratops, and how many thousands of hours of labour that we have to put into it, there's not really a high profit margin because it costs a lot of money.'

In some cases, 'we don't make money off it, but we can be involved with the publication of these specimens,' he added.

'It's more valuable to get them into the public trust then to try to hang onto them for 20 years in the hope that somebody may want to purchase them.'

When asked what keeps him doing this difficult job Mr Maltese said 'part of what keeps me going is the thrill. But a bit of it, and I hate to say it, is that

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