Somewhere around 150 million years ago, before the invention of private property, an 11-foot-tall Stegosaurus roamed the verdant forest and shrubland in what is now Moffat County, Colo. The forest was intercut by several coursing rivers, fringed by ferns, cycads, gingkos, stemmy horsetails and towering conifers. The Stegosaurus feasted voraciously on these plants its whole life, and had lived so long that the dinosaur developed arthritis. When the Stegosaurus died, its bones were preserved nearly immaculately in sedimentary rock that, for many years, belonged to no one but the Earth itself.
But one day that bone-studded land would belong to a commercial paleontologist named Jason Cooper, who in 2022 was wandering around his property when he spied a hint of femur protruding from a rock. Cooper unearthed the femur, and the nearly complete Stegosaurus accompanying it, as Asher Elbein reported for The New York Times. The fossil is marvelous—not just a behemoth, but also one of the most complete dinosaur skeletons ever found. Nicknamed Apex, the Stegosaurus was prepared and mounted and slated for auction at Sotheby's, which estimated the stegosaurus's value at $4 to $6 million—a sum only absurd in the idea that one can put a price on something as precious as a fossil, meaning the remains of an individual life. This is the ghoulish fallacy of dinosaur auctions: that animal remains should have sticker prices so high that the only real bidders are billionaires who believe they deserve to own not just any dinosaur, but the best dinosaur.
Dinosaur auctions are commonplace now—the surest way to generate as much money as one possibly can from a fossil, which means museums and other research institutions rarely win out. In 2020, a T. rex named Stan became the most expensive fossil ever sold after fetching $31.8 million in a private auction. The buyer was anonymous, and in 2022 it was announced that Stan would anchor a new natural history museum in Abu Dhabi, as Michael Greshko reported in National Geographic. On Wednesday, Apex's auction price of $44.6 million broke that record. "I am thrilled that such an important specimen has now taken its place in history, some 150 million years since it roamed the planet," Sotheby's Global Head of Science & Popular Culture, Cassandra Hatton, said in a statement so obscene it should make your head spin—the idea that a 27-foot-long dinosaur did not make history when it was unearthed from the ground, but rather when it was sold to some guy.
The guy in question is hedge fund billionaire Kenneth Griffin, who owns Citadel Securities and is estimated by Forbes to be worth about $38 billion. Griffin is clearly a guy who has money to burn; in 2021 he outbid a group of 17,000-plus cryptocurrency investors to buy one of 11 surviving first-edition copies of the U.S. Constitution, not because Griffin even really wanted the Constitution, but because he didn't want the crypto enthusiasts to have it. Griffin then loaned his copy of the Constitution to a museum in Arkansas, where it is on display for the public. Griffin's plans for Apex appear to be similar: the auction house said he intends to "explore loaning the specimen to a U.S. institution." "Apex was born in America and is going to stay in America!" he apparently said after the sale, in the verbal stylings of any good GOP mega-donor.
In one light, Griffin is an ideal buyer of the dinosaur, considering the circumstances. If his word is good, anyone who buys a ticket to a museum will be able to see Apex in person. He has a history of loaning his collection to museums, and even previously donated $16.6 million to the Field Museum to update the institution's dinosaur exhibit. So in this circumstance, we can be grateful that the whims of this one particular billionaire currently align with public interest. But at the risk of stating the extremely obvious, there is something fundamentally broken in a society that is relieved that a nearly pristine fossilized Stegosaurus was sold to a billionaire who has promised, ever so kindly, to let us teeming masses see it. But many scientifically important fossils surface only once at the auction block, only to disappear into some wretched foyer in a private residence of a water baron or Silicon Valley tycoon.
Scientists who are critical of the booming dinosaur bones market often frame these sales as a loss for science, and they are right. Those barons and tycoons have no obligation to allow researchers to study their specimens, and have functionally removed them from the realm of research. Sotheby's—one of the hottest auction houses for dinosaurs—generally refutes this idea. "Losing scientifically important fossils to a private collection is a concern often mentioned, but in our experience, we have yet to see it materialize," Sotheby's vice president Hatton told NPR after Apex's sale. "We find that clients overwhelmingly purchase specimens either for museums or donate them." But this is not always true, and a loan is not the same as a donation. What will happen to Apex when Griffin dies, or when he changes his mind? Will his three heirs squabble, Succession-style, over who gets the Constitution and who gets the Stegosaurus?
Scientists and even museums have no means of breaking up the "hellish" trinity of dinosaur auctions, Thomas Carr, a paleontologist at Carthage College in Wisconsin, told Artnet after a Gorgosaurus skeleton sold at Sotheby's for $6.1 million in 2022. This trinity consists of auction houses, the commercial companies that grub up fossils to sell, and the deep-pocketed private buyers. Before Stan was auctioned in 2020, the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology, a nonprofit scientific organization comprising approximately 2,000 paleontologists from around the world, wrote to Christie's asking the auction house to limit bidders to public institutions. The request was ignored. Now, about half of the 120 known specimens of T. rex are owned privately and not to the public. “They are thieves of time," Carr said.
But it is helpful to remember, that just like many broken systems in the United States, it does not have to be this way. U.S. law currently prohibits collecting scientifically valuable fossils from public lands without permits, but any fossils found on private land belong to the landowners to do with what they wish: auction them off, hammer them to bits, etc. Researchers have suggested many ways that fossil sales could be regulated, such as expanding U.S. antiquities laws to consider fossils part of our cultural heritage or adding a sales tax for buyers who intend to keep dinosaurs in private collections, Carolyn Gramling reported for Science News.
If anything should belong in the public domain, the history of the world seems like a deserving candidate. As such, the province of Alberta, Canada, has some of the most restrictive regulations for fossil collecting in the world. If you legally collect a fossil in Alberta, that fossil does not belong to you or even the landowner. It belongs to the government. And although you can keep the fossil as a custodian, you are not allowed to sell, alter, or remove the specimen from the province without permission from the government. The only exceptions are impressions of leaves, fossilized invertebrates like ammonites, and petrified wood—specimens in such high abundance they are generally not scientifically significant—and anything found on First Nations lands.
Stegosaurus went extinct about 80 million years before T. rex, making the completeness of Apex even more a marvel of preservation. The Washington Post noted that Sotheby's auction listed Apex as an undetermined species, which could suggest scientists haven't had a chance to examine and identify it. We will have to wait to see, depending on how generous this billionaire decides to be, if they will ever get that chance.
