Stegosaurus fossil sells at Sotheby’s auction house for record $44.6 million

The mounted skeleton of a stegosaurus dating back to the late Jurassic period sold at the Sotheby’s auction house for $44.6 million.

The stegosaurus is known for its distinctive set of bony plates jutting out from the back and for its spiked tail.

The princely sum is the most ever paid for a fossil, smashing the previous record of $31.8 million, which was paid for a Tyrannosaurus rex skeleton named “Stan” at Christie’s in 2020.

The amount also massively overperformed Sotheby’s own pre-sale projections of a price tag between $4.9 and $7.4 million, the auction house said in a release.

This skeleton, named “Apex,” was found in 2022 by commercial paleontologist Jason Cooper in the aptly named Dinosaur, Colorado.

The fossil is 11 feet tall and 27 feet long from nose to tail, and is one of the most complete stegosaurus skeletons yet found, with 254 bone elements included out of 319. The animal’s sex could not be determined.

The bones were preserved in hard sandstone that prevented warping, and shows signs of arthritis, indicating the specimen lived well into adulthood and old age, Sotheby’s said.

Some have decried the sale and the general practice of auctioning off fossils to private buyers, preferring instead to have the discoveries preserved for scientific inquiry and available to more scientists.

“I hate to say it — it doesn’t matter if someone wants to have this fossil. You know, it’s the fact that even if they own the coolest, bestest fossil that will ever be found, it essentially doesn’t scientifically exist,” paleontologist Cary Woodruff, who saw “Apex” when the animal was unearthed, told NPR last month.

The buyer plans to loan out “Apex” to an American institution, saying that “Apex was born in America and is going to stay in America!” according to the Sotheby’s release.

Sotheby’s did not name the person behind the winning bid, but The Wall Street Journal identified him as Citadel hedge fund founder Ken Griffin.

Mr. Griffin has a history with both dinosaurs and auctions.

He gave money to Chicago’s Field Museum in 2018 to pay for the cast of a titanosaur, the largest dino species yet discovered, and bought a first-edition copy of the U.S. Constitution at Sotheby’s for over $43 million in 2021, according to Financial Times.