A staggering $44.6M stegosaurus skeleton sold at Sotheby's auction
2:14 PM EDT, July 19, 2024
The question "Who can forbid the rich?" seems quite fitting here. At Sotheby's auction house in New York, a 150 million-year-old dinosaur skeleton went under the hammer. It was sold for a staggering $44.6 million.
It stands 11 feet tall, measures 27 feet long, and has been named Apex. The stegosaurus was auctioned off to Ken Griffin, an American billionaire and owner of the international hedge fund Citadel.
As " Gazeta Wyborcza notes," this is the highest amount ever paid for a dinosaur skeleton.
But as it turns out, it's not the first. Nicolas Cage paid the equivalent of around $250,000 for a tyrannosaurus skeleton. Leonardo DiCaprio had a mosasaur in his collection, and Russell Crowe bought a mosasaur skull from him, which he was forced to sell after an expensive divorce.
The good news is that the stegosaurus, by the decision of its new owner, is set to go to an American museum. Griffin is once again making a gesture towards U.S. museums. In 2018, he sponsored a titanosaur replica, the largest dinosaur discovered to date, for $16.5 million. This replica went to a Chicago museum.
Collectible dinosaurs: they are millions of years old, and the wealthy spend millions of dollars on them
Before Apex went under the hammer, its value was estimated at $4 to $6 million. The billionaire surpassed this amount by a factor of ten.
However, he was not the first to invest millions of dollars in bones millions of years old. In 2020, at Christie's auction house in England, a 38-foot-long T-rex was sold to a new owner for $31.8 million.
Cassandra Hatton, who specializes in science and pop culture auctions, in an interview with the "Financial Times." explains that luxury today is buying what interests us, not what we associate with luxury.
Apex was discovered in a place aptly named Dinosaur, Colorado. His skeleton is mostly intact, believed to have lived to an old age, and his only ailment was arthritis.
