Sotheby’s is set to auction a rare dinosaur skeleton three months after it sold a Tyrannosaurus rex for a record-breaking $50.1mn, as wealthy collectors’ appetite for the expensive fossils shows little sign of waning.
The Nanotyrannus — nicknamed “Jodi” and one of just three specimens known to science, according to the auction house — will be auctioned in New York at the end of October. Sotheby’s estimates it will fetch between $6mn and $9mn, although previous such estimates have proved conservative.
The planned sale of the skeleton, which was discovered in Montana in 2019 by rancher Jodi Pierson, signals the continued strength of a market that exploded into prominence when hedge fund billionaire Ken Griffin bought a Stegosaurus for $44.6mn in 2024.
“I would expect we will see deep and global bidding,” Cassandra Hatton, Sotheby’s vice-chair and global head of science and natural history, told the FT.
“Interest is always particularly high when we offer specimens that are both scientifically significant and visually impressive.”
There has been growing elite interest in acquiring dinosaur skeletons over the past two decades. Earlier this year, Tyrannosaurus “Gus” fetched a record-breaking price of $50.1mn when it was auctioned at Sotheby’s in a bidding battle that lasted 10 minutes. In 2007, celebrities Leonardo DiCaprio and Nicolas Cage went up against each other in a bidding war to buy a dinosaur skull.
Griffin’s “Apex” Stegosaurus is on display at the American Museum of Natural History in New York, while the location of “Gus” is not publicly known.
The Nanotyrannus has long been a source of debate among palaeontologists, according to Hatton, with some arguing that it was simply an adolescent T. Rex and others maintaining that it was a different and new genus of dinosaur.
That more than 80-year-old argument was resolved last year in a paper published by Lindsay Zanno and James Napoli, which showed that the Nanotyrannus was a distinct genus that coexisted with the T. rex.
“Jodi” is the first skeleton to come to market since the genus was verified, according to Sotheby’s.
The dinosaur, which measures approximately 6.5 feet tall and 19.6 feet long, was excavated by well-known commercial palaeontologist Clayton Phipps.
“We have so much coming down the line,” Hatton said of future dinosaur auctions. “It really is a category like no other.”