Stegosaurus skeleton record $45m at Sotheby’s

Carlie Porterfield, Billionaire collector Ken Griffin buys Stegosaurus skeleton for record $45m at Sotheby’s, The Art Newspaper, 19 July 2024

This is the most valuable fossil to ever sell at auction, as the market for dinosaur bones continues to climb.

A woman stands next to Apex the Stegosaurus. Courtesy Sotheby’s, Photo by Matthew Sherman.

A rare dinosaur skeleton sold for $44.6m (including fees) at Sotheby’s New York on Wednesday (17 July), making this Stegosaurus the most valuable fossil to ever sell at auction. The winning bidder was none other than mega-collector Ken Griffin, the billionaire hedge-fund manager who founded Citadel, according to a close source. Griffin intends to explore loaning the specimen, nicknamed Apex, to a US institution.

“Apex was born in America and is going to stay in America,” the buyer said after the sale, according to a Sotheby’s press release. Apex’s sale beat out that of Stan the Tyrannosaurus rex, which fetched $27.5m at Christie’s in 2020. It was the most valuable fossil to sell at auction at that time, and is expected to be unveiled as part of the still yet-to-open Natural History Museum Abu Dhabi.

The 150-million-year-old Apex skeleton was discovered in May 2022 by the commercial paleontologist Jason Cooper on his property in Moffat County, Colorado, near the aptly named town of Dinosaur. The area is part of the Morrison Formation, a patch of sedimentary rock in the western US that stretches 600,000 sq. miles and has the most concentrated number of preserved dinosaur fossils in North America.

Apex measures 11 ft tall and 27 ft long from nose to tail, and while the bones show no signs of injuries sustained in combat or by attack, experts say the dinosaur probably lived to an old enough age that it developed arthritis.

Since the early days of the discovery, Cooper collaborated with the Sotheby’s specialist Cassandra Hatton, the auction house says, a rarity for the process of uncovering a specimen of this kind. The skeleton is in remarkably good condition, Sotheby’s adds, and is made up of 254 fossilised bones out of the about 319 Apex would have had during its lifetime (Apex’s gender is unknown).

Griffin is known for dropping eye-watering sums on works of art. In 2020, he reportedly spent $100m on Boy and Dog in a Johnnypump(1982) by Jean-Michel Basquiat, which he loaned to the Art Institute of Chicago until 2022. Griffin also spent a reported $500m combined to purchase Willem de Kooning’s Interchange (1955) and Jackson Pollock’s Number 17A (1948) from fellow billionaire art collector David Geffen in 2015. But this is not Griffin’s first time venturing into other collectibles — in 2021, he won a first-edition copy of the US Constitution, spending $41m ($43.2m with fees) and, in the process, outbidding ConstitutionDAO, a loosely-knit group of about 17,000 crypto-advocates who had raised funds in Etherium to purchase the rare document. Griffin also donated $16.5m to the Field Museum in Chicago in 2017 to update the institution’s famed dinosaur exhibition.

Apex was the leading lot in Sotheby’s natural history auction, alongside meteorites, minerals, other fossils and even a set of Neanderthal tools sold for $22,800 (with fees) against a $5,000-$8,000 estimate. Thousands of visitors saw Apex on display at Sotheby’s New York space, the auction house says.