Unlock Editor’s Digest for free
Roula Khalaf, editor-in-chief of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.
Ken Griffin, the founder of the Citadel hedge fund, has paid $44.6 million for a 150-million-year-old stegosaurus known as “Apex,” making it the most valuable fossil ever sold at auction.
The fossil, which is 3.35 meters (11 feet) high and 8.25 meters (27 feet) long, exceeded its lowest estimate by more than 11 times, Sotheby’s auction house in New York said on Wednesday.
Although the bidder was officially anonymous, a person familiar with Griffin’s plans confirmed the purchase and said he planned to display it in an American museum. “Apex was born in America and will remain in America,” Griffin told the auction house, which quoted it in a press release about the sale.
This isn’t Griffin’s first foray into dinosaurs. In 2018, he gave $16.5 million to Chicago’s Field Museum to fund an exhibition of a cast of the largest dinosaur ever discovered, an Argentine herbivore known as a titanosaur. Griffin also paid $43.2 million for a copy of the U.S. Constitution in 2021, loaning it to the Crystal Bridges Museum in Arkansas.
The specimen sold Wednesday was discovered in Dinosaur, Colorado, and is largely intact. The stegosaurus is believed to be old and showing signs of arthritis.
Wednesday’s auction underscored the growing interest in fossil collecting and the high prices buyers are willing to pay for some of the most impressive specimens offered for sale to private collectors.
The first dinosaur sold at auction was “Sue” the Tyrannosaurus rex in 1997, also at Sotheby’s. The fossil fetched $8.4 million and is now on display at the Field Museum. “Stan,” a male Tyrannosaurus rex, was sold at Christie’s in 2020 for $31.8 million to the government of Abu Dhabi for a new museum there.
The fossils have attracted the attention of several celebrities, including Leonardo DiCaprio and Nicolas Cage, who competed in a bidding war to acquire a dinosaur skull. Cage ultimately won, though he returned it a few years later after investigators determined it had been obtained illegally.
Apex was the crown jewel of the Sotheby’s Natural History auction, which featured fossils, meteorites and Paleolithic tools. The auction was attended by thousands of people.
The auction house documented the process of discovering, preparing and mounting Apex with commercial paleontologist Jason Cooper, who unearthed the fossil two years ago on his property in Moffat County, Colorado. The region was the richest source of dinosaur fossils in the U.S., Sotheby’s said, due to its location in a series of sedimentary rocks from the Upper Jurassic.
Cooper discovered several other dinosaurs in the US.
Other items in the same auction included a set of Neanderthal tools for $22,800 and a lunar meteorite for $40,800, more than four times its high estimate. Seven bidders went after Apex during the live auction at Sotheby’s, the auction house said.
“‘Apex’ lived up to its name today, inspiring bidders around the world to purchase the most valuable fossil ever put up for auction,” Cassandra Hatton, Sotheby’s global head of science and popular culture, said in a statement. The identity of the buyer was first reported by the Wall Street Journal.