The evidence is there to behold: a photo, taken by an Alexandra motelier who recently hosted Mr Brewer and partner Georgia Barber while the pair delivered some fossils to the town's Central Stories museum shop, depicts a full skeleton of a psittacosaurus, or "parrot" lizard.
The dinosaur in question was just passing through. Having collected it from Otago Museum after staff there had completed restoration work, "technical stuff to make it look pretty", Mr Brewer was planning to display it in his Nelson shop over the winter before returning it to the Dunedin institution later in the year.
A distant relative of the triceratops, psittacosaurus was a herbivore that roamed the land mass now known as Asia in the early Cretaceous period, about 130 to 100 million years ago. Despite having a powerful beak on its upper jaw, it would have been "fodder for carnivorous dinosaurs", Mr Brewer explains via phone from Nelson.
"We'll find a way. The biggest we've ever done is the lower jaw of a mammoth. We've been in negotiations over a cave bear but it never happened."
Though Percy, imported from China about five years ago, would fetch a retail price of about $9500, Mr Brewer also sources more modest fossils such as trilobites (hard-shelled, segmented sea creatures that existed more than 520 million years ago, pre-dating dinosaurs) or even shell and flora fossils, the majority of which end up in museum gift shops, pocket-money pieces over which children might pore.
"We are putting together a shipment right now. We talk to suppliers: 'We have X amount of money to spend; what have you got for us? We'd like something Ice Age from this guy ... '. We have people who want very specific things. I once had to bring back a graptolite (a small aquatic animal that existed from 542 million to 318 million years ago) for someone. They are not T-rex, but to this guy the specimen I brought back was just the same.
Wyoming, in the United States, and Morocco are two key areas for commercially available fossils, Mr Brewer explains, adding he also sources material from the United Kingdom, in particular Yorkshire and the south coast of England.
He and Ms Barber visited Morocco late last year to meet local suppliers as well as indulge in a passion he has held since a child.
"My parents used to make and sell candles in Cornwall and as part of that business they started selling a few fossils. It grew from there. My father did some work on archaeology sites when he was young. He didn't go to university but he would love to have been an archaeologist."
His son did, however. The boy who had a shelf in his bedroom containing rows of labelled fossils went on to study archaeology at Exeter University.
"I remember as a child sitting on my older sister's driveway, which consisted of rocks containing fossil ammonites," Mr Brewer says. "It's a phase we all go through. Some of us don't grow out of it. I've been in the trade for 20 years now, since I was a kid."
Mr Brewer followed his parents to New Zealand nine years ago, the family setting up its wholesale and import business, which has been supplying fossils to various institutions, including Otago Museum, Central Stories and Te Papa.
As various websites suggest, fossils make great art. They can also cost as much as great art. "Sue", a 90% complete Tyrannosaurus rex skeleton, fetched $US8.3 million at a Sotheby's auction in 1997.
The purchaser was Chicago's Field Museum.
Hamish Campbell, a senior scientist at GNS Science, geologist at Te Papa and convener of the Geoscience Society of New Zealand's palaeontology special interests group, says there is a global black market for dinosaurs.
"The filthy rich will go to any length to get what they want. I have very little experience of that world but I do know it exists."
All of which prompts the question: at what point does it become acceptable to reduce an object of possible scientific and historical significance to a piece of furniture?
Mr Brewer says it is important to maintain a balance between "the stuff that has to be preserved" and that which is commonly found.
"Moroccan fossils have been studied ad infinitum. What I have got for sale contains nothing of academic interest - though that is slightly difficult to say because it is all of academic interest to some degree. There are no specimens that are so rare that a natural history museum hasn't got them.
"The understanding is that if anything of huge significance is found it is declared.
"One of the beauties of both archaeology and palaeontology is that the layperson can make huge scientific discoveries."
Take the late Joan Wiffen, whose 1975 discovery of the tail bone of a theropod "dinosaur" in the Maungahouanga Valley in northern Hawkes Bay and subsequent unearthing of bones of half a dozen other dinosaurs, including an armoured ankylosaur and marine reptiles such as mosasaurs and plesiosaurs, changed scientific thinking about New Zealand's prehistory.
"Before she discovered those bones, it was thought such dinosaurs didn't exist here," Mr Brewer says. "She wasn't an academic."
(In 1994, Mrs Wiffen received an honorary doctorate from Massey University and the following year was made a CBE. In 2004, she accepted the Morris Skinner Award from the United States-based Society of Vertebrate Palaeontology for outstanding and sustained contributions to scientific knowledge.)
"Mary Anning did exactly the same thing," Mr Brewer says of the British woman who, in the first half of the 19th century, became known around the world for her Jurassic age fossil discoveries at Lyme Regis, on the Dorset coast.
"She not only gave a lot of understanding to science; she also had the very first fossil shop in the world. She was literally the woman who sold sea shells on the sea shore. That is an example of how it can go hand in hand," he says.
In a country where the fossil community is surprisingly large - about 25 professional palaeontologists are employed in New Zealand institutions and several are self-employed; there are also many others who might be considered amateur palaeontologists, students or enthusiasts - Dr Campbell believes Mr Brewer is something of a rarity.
"There aren't that many people selling fossils in New Zealand. He does have an interest in these things and is making a fist of it. He is bringing into New Zealand fossils that people are interested in.
"I've actually met James. GNS Science put together a touring fossil exhibition called 'Dead Precious'. It got down to the Otago Museum and ended up at Te Papa last year. There were some spectacular fossils that James had produced and had on loan to Otago Museum."
However, Dr Campbell shares the concern of some of his scientific peers regarding the potential loss of historically significant fossils.
"Once it is in private ownership it is just about lost, actually. The scientific context in which it was collected is lost. Very few collectors document things so well. A fossil might be spectacularly beautiful but it is of no use to science unless we know where it is from."
Yet the commercialisation of fossil collecting can have its benefits, says John E. Simes, collections manager in the palaeontology and environmental change section of Wellington-based GNS Science, a Crown Research Institute.
"In the United States, where there are fabulous dinosaur fossils, there are some controlled sites where registered diggers can operate and sell fossils. Their costs are high but the reward can also be high. They do, however, have a code of operation whereby any 'new-to-science' item that is revealed must be vetted by an expert before it is prepared and it could not be sold on the commercial market," Mr Simes says.
In such cases, commercial activity is regarded as helpful as it facilitates more excavation than might normally happen if it were just left to scientists.
"So, in this situation, commercial factors are critical to good new discoveries," Mr Simes says. "We are a long way from this situation here, where fossils are, by and large, not so spectacular and commercial pressures are very low.
"Here, the best we can do is publicise where to find fossils," he says referring to The Kiwi Fossil Hunter's handbook. The book, by GNS geologist Dr James Crampton, was released late last year to coincide with the opening of the "Dead Precious" exhibition at Te Papa.
"In this book, there is a message about the ethics of careful, considerate fossil-collecting," Mr Simes says. "We encourage good collectors to be in touch with us over their finds in an attempt to be sure that rare fossils do make it into the national collection."
LEGALLY SPEAKING
In New Zealand, The Protected Objects Amendment Act 2006 is designed to prevent objects - including all fossils - from leaving our shores unless a permit is obtained.
"This allows objects to leave the country for legitimate purposes and I guess this could include those for sale, but it has never been put to the test as far as I know," says John E. Simes, Collections Manager in the palaeontology and environmental change section of Wellington-based Crown Research Institute GNS Science.
"The Ministry of Culture and Heritage administers this and such a request is not likely to get past the referees. There is no law preventing the sale of fossils within New Zealand."
