Sotheby’s sold an unusually complete stegosaurus fossil at auction on Wednesday for a mind-boggling $44.6 million, smashing the record price for a fossil previously set by the king of the dinosaur world, Tyrannosaurus rex.
The unexpectedly high price – which is more than 10 times the low estimate – shows that the market for prehistoric specimens continues to grow, worrying paleontologists who fear scientists could be priced out of the market.
With its trademark back plates and cavernous ribcage, this stegosaurus, which is said to have walked the Earth about 150 million years ago in what is now Colorado, was named Apex for its exceptional quality. It was the subject of a 15-minute bidding war with seven bidders from around the world over the phone.
The winning bidder was Kenneth Griffin, the billionaire hedge fund, according to a person familiar with the sale who was not authorized to discuss it. The Wall Street Journal first reported that Griffin, who has donated millions of dollars to dinosaur exhibits at the Field Museum in Chicago, had purchased the stegosaurus.
The auction house declined to name the winning bidder, but said the buyer intended to “explore the possibility of loaning the specimen to an American institution.”
Four years ago, the commercial fossil market was rocked by the sale of a T. rex skeleton called Stan that fetched a record $31.8 million, sparking a gold rush for dinosaur fossils in the American West and alarming academics who fear that the surge in prices could push the fossils beyond the reach of museums and universities that wish to study them.
The sale of the stegosaurus fossil for $44.6 million, which includes buyer’s fees, eclipsed the record set by Stan, which ended up at a developing natural history museum in Abu Dhabi, the capital of the United Arab Emirates. At 11 feet tall and 27 feet long, the Apex is among the largest of its kind.
“I’m amazed at how much it was worth,” said Jim Kirkland, Utah’s state paleontologist, who was invited to examine the specimen but declined because he didn’t want to advertise a fossil that could be sold to a private owner.
Kirkland said that from the photos he has seen of the specimen, it could be scientifically valuable because of its completeness. (It contains 254 fossil bone elements out of an estimated total of 319, the auction house said.) He said he hopes whoever buys it will fully document it and make the data available to researchers. “The whole thing has to go through a CT scan,” Kirkland said.
Jason Cooper, a commercial paleontologist, discovered Apex in 2022 when he was walking on his property — which is near the town of Dinosaur, Colorado — and found part of a femur sticking out of a rock. He and his colleagues excavated it the following year.
Most of the high-profile dinosaurs sold at auction have been tyrannosaurus rex, the most recognizable and beloved type of dinosaur. Sotheby’s sold a T. rex fossil named Sue at auction for $8.4 million in 1997, helping to start a boom in the market for old bones. But it was Christie’s sale of T. rex Stan in 2020 that sparked the latest influx of fossils onto the market.
In 2022, Deinonychus antirrhopus (the inspiration for the velociraptors depicted in the movie “Jurassic Park”) sold for $12.4 million, and Gorgosaurus brought in $6.1 million. That same year, Sotheby’s sold a T. rex tooth for more than $100,000.
But there were also signs that sellers were overestimating the value of their bids in search of another record holder like Stan.
Sotheby’s estimated that the T. rex skull, which was auctioned in 2022, would have fetched between $15 million and $20 million, but it sold for just $6.1 million. Christie’s has pulled a T. rex named Shen with a high estimate of $25 million from a 2022 auction after scientists said data on its completeness were misleading.
Jingmai O’Connor, a paleontologist with the Field Museum, was conducting research in Montana when he heard the news of the Apex sale. “$44.6 million for a stegosaurus?” she said. “Sorry, the paleontologists around me are laughing.”
She said it was rare to find such a complete specimen, but questioned how much scientific value the fossil could have given the presence of so many partial skeletons.
“With $44 million for scientists,” she said, “we could advance our understanding of dinosaurs by decades.”
