In May 2022, Jason Cooper, a commercial paleontologist, went for a walk on his property near the aptly named Colorado Dinosaur City with a friend and found part of a femur sticking out of some rock.
This femur yielded a Stegosaurus fossil, among the largest and most complete ever found, which was subsequently nicknamed “Apex”. In July, auction house Sotheby’s will auction the Apex for an estimated $4 million to $6 million, making the skeleton the latest flashpoint in a long-running debate over private fossil trade.
Dinosaur fossils have fetched escalating prices at auction houses since 1997, when Sotheby’s sold “Sue” T. rex to the Field Museum in Chicago for $8.36 million. In 2020, “Stan,” another largely complete T. rex skeleton, sold at Christie’s for $31.8 million.
Such pricing has raised serious concerns among academic paleontologists, said Stuart Sumida, vice president of the Society for Vertebrate Paleontology. Many of them have watched in recent decades as fossils that could unlock scientific mysteries end up in the hands of wealthy private collectors rather than research institutions.
Mr. Cooper and his colleagues discovered the Sotheby’s-bound Stegosaurus in 2023. Excavations on his property have turned up a number of Jurassic dinosaurs, several of which Mr. Cooper has donated to institutions such as the Brigham Young University Museum of Paleontology in Provo, Utah and the Frost Science Museum in Miami.
Mr Cooper described Stegosaurus Apex as a unique and scientifically important specimen. Skeletons—even partial ones—of the plate-and-spiked-tailed herbivore are rare. The skeletal support contains material from about 70 percent of the animal’s bones. At 11 feet tall and over 20 feet long, Apex is twice the size of “Sophie,” the most intact stegosaurus specimen known, and has unusual proportions, remarkably long legs, and square bottom plates.
The specimen was also found with skin impressions, possibly from the neck, which will be offered as part of the sale.
Mr Cooper oversaw the preparation and mounting of the stegosaurus, 3D scanning the existing bones and mirroring the specimen’s elements to fill in the gaps. The team also collected extensive contextual data that they believe could be attractive to prospective buyers. The information includes a detailed site survey, quarry maps and other documentation
Mr. Cooper also invited several paleontologists to examine the specimen.
“If you combine size, completeness and bone preservation, this is the best stegosaurus I’ve ever seen,” said Rod Sheetz, a curator at Brigham Young University’s Museum of Paleontology, who inspected it on Mr. Cooper’s property.
Cassandra Hatton, head of science and popular culture at Sotheby’s, said the auction house was working closely with Mr Cooper to strengthen the scientific legitimacy of this privately sold dinosaur mount, with the aim of creating a model for future auctions.
“This is the first time a specimen has been auctioned where we’ve worked together since it was dug up,” she said. “This is the most transparent dinosaur sale ever.”
But Jim Kirkland, Utah’s state paleontologist, refused to endorse the stegosaurus when invited by Mr. Cooper. “Looks pretty interesting,” he wrote in an email, “but I’m not going to promote something that’s going up for auction. I would link it directly to museums, but not this.
While anything could happen at public auction, Mr. Cooper and Ms. Hatton expressed their hope that the Apex will eventually land in a scientific institution — whether through outright purchase or through a donation from a private collector. The team gathered the data and documentation not only to reassure potential buyers of the specimens’ authenticity, but also to help museums seamlessly integrate such a specimen into a research collection.
“Whoever buys this also has the right to come onto my property and collect contextual information,” Mr Cooper said. “A private collector might not care about stego for it, but for a museum it would be really cool.”
However, the potential cost of the stegosaurus may be out of reach for many institutions, Dr. Sumida said. He said the cost of researching an already mounted and reconstructed specimen could be higher than the purchase price. Reconstructing and mounting fossils is as much art as science—and specific choices can be used to fool the uninitiated by blurring the lines about which parts of a given bone are real.
“If the specimen is as scientifically important as it is supposed to be, then they are doing it the wrong way,” Dr Sumida said.
Carrie Woodruff, curator of vertebrate paleontology at the Frost Museum of Science in Miami, agreed that public auctions are often “scientific slaughterhouses.” But Dr Woodruff, who also examined the specimen before the auction agreement, suggested that collecting detailed records, photographs and digital scans of commercially sold fossils was something other sellers should emulate. That way, “at least a remnant of the scientific data can exist if the specimen doesn’t fall into the public trust,” he said.
Ultimately, however, Dr. Woodruff agreed that the public trust is where such fossils belong.
“If a wealthy person is interested in how they can work with a scientific institution to contribute to scientific knowledge and progress,” he said, “then I hope specimens like this will attract their attention.”
