RARE DINO FOSSIL SELLS AT RECORD USD 30.5 MN

The only known juvenile Ceratosaurus fossil has smashed estimates at Sotheby’s New York’s natural history auction today, fetching a whopping USD 30.5 million against a presale high estimate of USD 6 million.

The lot was won after a fierce six-minute bidding war, according to the auction house, with the final bid landing the Ceratosaurus relic among the most expensive fossils to be sold at auction. In a post-sale release, Sotheby’s said the buyer of the rare fossil plans to loan it to an institution.

Only three other Ceratosaurus fossils are known to exist. The current example, which walked the Earth on two legs about 154 to 159 million years ago, stands just over 6 feet tall and nearly 11 feet long, and contains 139 original bone elements. Uncovered in 1996 at the Bone Cabin Quarry in Wyoming, this Late Jurassic specimen was mounted for the first time ahead of the sale and went on public display at Sotheby’s.

“This juvenile Ceratosaurus is a marvel of prehistoric preservation—an extraordinary specimen that bridges scientific rarity with natural beauty,” said the house’s vice chairman for science and natural history, Cassandra Hatton, in press materials before the sale. “Among the very finest dinosaur fossils to ever be offered at auction, this unique specimen underscores Sotheby’s ongoing commitment to presenting the most important and precious treasures from our planet’s deep past.”

The appeal of dinosaurs to modern humankind is seemingly endless. Whereas we have existed for just a few hundred thousand years, these creatures ruled the Earth for some 165 million years. The Jurassic Park franchise has grossed billions of dollars worldwide, and auction houses have even given fossils pride of place in their high-profile contemporary art sales, where they have fetched tens of millions of dollars.

Sotheby’s has a record of historic fossil sales. In 1997, it sold Sue, a T-rex, the first dinosaur to come to auction, to Chicago’s Field Museum for what the New York Times called the “staggering” price of USD 8.4 million. In 2024, hedge fund billionaire collector Ken Griffin plunked down USD 44.6 million for Apex, the most complete Stegosaurus skeleton ever discovered, at the same house, making it the most expensive fossilised skeleton ever sold.

Thriving in a warm climate at the time the supercontinent Pangaea was breaking up, Ceratosaurs lived across what are now North America, Europe, and parts of Africa, alongside herbivores such as Stegosaurus and Apatosaurus. Ceratosaurus had a distinctive nasal horn, long teeth, and bony protrusions down its back and tail. It was a distant cousin of the Tyrannosaurus rex, but lived about 100 million years before its more famous relative.

Bone Cabin Quarry, where this specimen was unearthed, was the site of numerous expeditions organized by the American Museum of Natural History from 1898 to 1905; Henry Fairfield Osborn, the museum’s curator of vertebrate paleontology, described the quarry as “the greatest find of extinct animals made in a single locality in any part of the world.” It turned up, among other dinosaurs, examples of Brontosaurus, Allosaurus, and Stegosaurus, as well as extinct crocodiles and turtles.

Some scientists have expressed dismay at the private sale of fossils, asserting that it does a great disservice to science when such specimens pass into private hands.

“If an oligarch buys a dinosaur skeleton and puts it in the foyer of one of his mansions, then it is effectively lost to science. Gone, a ghost,” Steve Brusatte, an American palaeontologist who works for the University of Edinburgh, told the Daily Mail in 2022.

Not necessarily, countered Hatton. “These specimens have survived for millions of years, and will be around for millions more; while there is a chance they may not be available for study immediately following the sale, they surely will be at some point in the future,” she said in a statement to Artnet News at the time.

In fact, Griffin lent Apex to the American Museum of Natural History, where it remains on long-term public display.

-Artnet