An anonymous buyer outbid six others for Apex, breaking the previous auction record of £24.4 million spent on a Tyrannosaurus rex nicknamed Stan in 2020.
Thursday 18 July 2024 10:32, United Kingdom
A near-complete fossil of a Stegosaurus has sold for a record $44.6 million (£34.2 million), becoming the most valuable fossil ever sold at auction.
An anonymous American buyer outbid six other buyers for the bone set, dubbed Apex, at Sotheby’s in new York Wednesday.
They paid a record price, breaking the previous auction record of $31.8 million (£24.4 million) spent on a Tyrannosaurus rex nicknamed Stan in 2020 and smashing the pre-sale estimate of $4 million to $6 million (£3 million to £4.6 million).
Apex measures 3.3 metres (11 feet) high and 8.2 metres (27 feet) long, making it among the most complete fossils ever discovered.
The dinosaur had lived long enough to show signs of arthritis, the auction house said.
Cassandra Hatton, who heads Sotheby’s scientific business, said Apex “has now taken its place in history, some 150 million years after it first roamed the planet.”
Apex, she said, is like “a coloring book.” dinosaur“, for its well-preserved features.
The buyer is American and plans to consider lending Apex to an institution in the United States.
The paleontology community has mixed feelings about dinosaur fossil sales, with some believing the specimens belong to museums or research centers that cannot afford exorbitant auction prices.
A commercial paleontologist named Jason Cooper discovered the fossil in 2022 on his property near, perhaps unsurprisingly, the town of Dinosaur, Colorado, a small community near Dinosaur National Monument and the Utah border.
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The first dinosaur to be sold at auction was a T. rex named Sue, which sold for $8.2 million (£6.3 million) in 1997.
This is the first time an auction house has been involved with a specimen of this type throughout the entire process, from discovery to sale, Sotheby’s said on its website.