The nearly complete fossilized remains of a stegosaurus fetched $44.6 million at auction on Wednesday, Sotheby’s said. Billionaire investor Ken Griffin made the winning bid, the company said. Wall Street Journal and CNBC.
The fossil, dubbed “Apex,” is considered one of the most complete ever found, the auction house said.
““Apex was born in America and will stay in America!” Griffin said after the sale, according to Bloomberg.
The price exceeded the pre-sale estimate of $4 to $6 million and surpassed a previous auction record for dinosaur fossils: $31.8 million for the remains of a Tyrannosaurus rex nicknamed Stan, sold in 2020.
“Apex has now taken its place in history, some 150 million years since it first appeared on the planet,” said Cassandra Hatton, head of Sotheby’s science department.
The sale of dinosaur fossils frustrates academic paleontologists who believe the specimens belong in museums or research centers that cannot afford the high auction prices.
Griffin beat out six other bidders. Sotheby’s said the buyer plans to loan Apex to an institution in the U.S.
The stegosaurus was one of the most distinctive dinosaurs in the world, with spiky plates on its back. Hatton called Apex “a coloring book dinosaur” because of its well-preserved features.
Apex was a large stegosaurus that was 3.3 meters (11 feet) long and 8.2 meters (27 feet) long from head to tail. It lived long enough to show signs of arthritis, Sotheby’s said.
A commercial paleontologist named Jason Cooper discovered the fossil in 2022 on his property near, perhaps unsurprisingly, the town of Dinosaur, Colorado. The small community is near Dinosaur National Monument and the Utah border.