Fate of fossilised dinosaurs in hands of super-rich as market booms

Times

2 days ago

Money, the old adage goes, can't buy you happiness — but it can buy you a 150 million-year-old fossilised dinosaur. Sotheby's, one of the world's largest brokers of fine and decorative art, is auctioning off a rare ceratosaurus skeleton, the only known juvenile specimen. Priced between $4 million and $6 million, after July 16 it could be in the hands of a private collector.
The super-rich are splashing cash on dinosaur bones, but palaeontologists are divided over the booming market. Last year, Ken Griffin, an American hedge fund manager, paid $44.6 million for a 150 million-year-old stegosaurus that was known as 'Apex'. It is the most that has ever been paid for a fossil, and it is now on loan to the American Museum of Natural History in New York.
Others end up in the hands of celebrities. Nicolas Cage paid $276,000 for a skull of a Tyrannosaurus rex cousin, outbidding Leonardo DiCaprio, before returning it to the Mongolian government after learning it was stolen. Russell Crowe meanwhile was drinking 'a bunch of vodka' with DiCaprio when he offered $35,000 for the Titanic star's mosasaur skull to appease his dinosaur mad kids.
This childlike fascination betrays a more serious business. Jethro Sverdloff, director of the Art Ancient gallery in London, said: 'This is still an immature market and there are best-in-class fossils available at reasonable prices, but also serious pitfalls for the uninformed. People cross into a totally different category [from fine art] and assume the normal rules don't apply. They still need to check for condition, provenance and quality.'
Private ownership isn't necessarily bad, Sverdloff said, adding: 'The private market has long helped preserve and promote important cultural objects and the same is true for fossils. In many cases, it's private funding that allows excavation and conservation of specimens that might otherwise erode or be lost entirely.'
He said that blockbuster films like Jurassic World Rebirth had pulled new buyers into the market, 'including people who didn't realise they could own something like this'.
Generally, the more famous a dinosaur, the bigger the price tag. The ceratosaurus doesn't quite have the star power of a T. rex, but given that only three other such skeletons are known to exist, it has bags of scientific appeal. It is more valuable for being a juvenile skeleton too. Fossilisation requires that flesh and limbs remain intact before the very long process of mineral permeation. Yet young dinosaurs had fragile bones and they were tender, meaning they were eaten quickly.
The Sotheby's fossil was found on privately-owned land in Albany County, Wyoming, in the world-famous Bone Cabin Quarry — one of the richest sources of dinosaur bones in the US.
Ceratosaurus are 'interesting carnivores that are not well known and somewhat of a mystery in paleobiology', the Sotheby's page reads, 'making each discovery a significant event in the field of paleontology'.
Yet this fossil, the only known one of its kind, could end up gathering dust in a private collection. Professor Paul Barrett of the Natural History Museum in London, told the Financial Times that palaeontologists are polarised on the issue. He said: 'At one end of the spectrum, there's the view that all fossils should belong to everybody and should be in museums for the privilege of scientists to work on. Others are more laissez faire and believe you can work with any private collector.'
Auction houses, meanwhile, are cashing in. On November 16, 2024, French auction houses Collin du Bocage and Barbarossa sold the largest dinosaur ever offered publicly at auction. 'Vulcain', a 67-foot-long apatosaurus named for the Roman god of fire, sold for $6.3 million.