If Gene Harris had his way, nothing in his store would be for sale: Not the baby pterodactyl dug up in western Kansas and listed for $162,000, the mounted Barbary lion priced at $28,200, or even the framed longhorn beetles, a bargain at $36.

''If I could afford all of these, I would buy them myself and just have a huge place to stroll up and down,'' he said.

Harris opened Art By God in South Dade in 1982. It's now housed in the Design District on Biscayne Boulevard.

He traces his interest in fossils back to his childhood in Broken Bow, Okla., where he was always scavenging rocks. His interest only grew when he took a job as an engineering surveyor with the World Bank in Bolivia.

''All through the day I'd see an interesting rock or fossil and pick it up and put it in my bag, and at the end of the day I'd be carrying 40 or 50 pounds,'' he said.

He opened his first store in Bolivia in the mid-1970s after his World Bank contract ran out. After starting a family, he headed back to the states.

Over the years, his business has grown to include a second shop at Bayside Marketplace, as well as one in Laredo, Texas, and wholesale outlets in Atlanta, High Point, N.C., and Dallas. His typical customer, he said, is eclectic, maybe even eccentric, someone ``who would rather be an individual than a Gucci-ite.''

In his shop are strands of beads carved from every stone imaginable ($5) and a large tribal dance mask ($845) mounted near a shelf of fertility gods and carved African heads. One table holds a dozen or more amethyst geodes measuring two feet and selling for about $900. There are boxes and boxes of minerals, a mounted zebra head ($6,240), a lamp made from a buffalo foot ($290) and fossilized dinosaur eggs ($650 to $8,650). Then there are the butterflies, hundreds frozen in glass frames.

Last month, Harris installed a 30-foot-long Miocene whale. Age: about 30 million years.

Prices range from 50 cents to $162,000 (that pterodactyl).

Harris procures his items from taxidermists, hunters downsizing their collections and estates selling off family belongings. Museums sell pieces when they run out of room or need cash.

He also works with a team of fossil finders. Fossils found on private land are the property of the land owner, he said. Human artifacts are protected and cannot be sold.

''The best thing we've come up with is we had a triceratops we sold a couple of years ago,'' he said.

''I see art in everything we have. I see the depth, especially in the fossils and skulls, the evolution and adaptation,'' he said. ``All that is just mind-boggling to me.''

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