Museums and academic institutions typically don’t have the kind of money it takes to compete with private bidders in auctions or any such competitive sales. That number would double if private specimens were included. rex specimens are publicly available to researchers. rex grew, and studying fossils of youngsters could help ( SN: 1/6/20). Similarly, scientists know little about how T. rex males differed from females, researchers need between 70 and 100 good specimens for statistically significant analyses, an amount scientists don’t currently have. If we don’t have a good sample size, we can’t claim to know anything about ,” Carr says.įor example, to be able to tell all the ways that T. That loss is “wreaking havoc on our dataset. At least half of them are owned privately and aren’t available to the public. There are only about 120 known specimens of T. “You might as well take a sledgehammer to it and destroy it.” A desire for one’s own T. “It doesn’t matter if is bought by some oligarch in Russia who says scientists can come and study it,” he says. But a fossil sold into private or commercial hands is subject to the whim of its owner - which means anything could happen to it at any time, Carr says. rex and other dinosaurs and animals in public repositories, such as museums, ensures that scientists have consistent access to study the objects, including being able to replicate or reevaluate previous findings. “They are our only means of understanding the biology and evolution of extinct animals.” That’s appealing to collectors, she adds: “If you’re a high-value buyer, you’re a person who wants the finest things.”īut fossils’ true value is the information they hold, says Thomas Carr, a paleontologist at Carthage College in Kenosha, Wis. But nowadays these fossils are on display in shiny gallery spaces and are being appraised and marketed as rare objets d’art. The bones might once have been bought and sold at dusty “cowboy fossil” dealerships. rex fossils are increasingly being treated more like rare works of art than bits of scientific evidence, Yates says. One reason for the sky-high prices may be that T. At those prices, the public institutions that might try to claim these glimpses into the deep past are unable to compete with deep-pocketed private buyers, researchers say. rex fossils now fetch at auction can mean a big loss for science. The fossil was originally appraised at about $6 million - still a very large sum, though nothing like the final tally, which was the result of a three-way bidding war.īut the staggering amounts of money T. Stan’s final price “was completely unexpected,” Yates says. “These are astronomical sums of money, really surprising sums of money,” says Donna Yates, a criminologist at Maastricht University in the Netherlands who studies high-value collectibles. Marcus Müller-Witte, M.A./Courtesy of Christie’s That auction was withdrawn due to questions over the number of replica bones in the fossil. rex fossil ever sold at auction in Asia, with an expected price of $15 million to $25 million. Shen (pictured) was slated to be the first T. However, the auction house pulled it over concerns about the number of replica bones used in the fossil. rex fossil named Shen was anticipated to sell for between $15 million and $25 million at a Christie’s auction in Hong Kong in late November. It’s expected to sell for about $15 million.Īnother T. rex skull, will be the centerpiece of a Sotheby’s auction in New York City. rex’s value is sky-high, and the dinosaur continues to have its teeth firmly sunk into the auction world in 2022. That kind of publicity - and cachet - means that T. rex held the top spot it went for $8.3 million in 1997. rex smashed records in October 2020 when a bidding war drove its price to $31.8 million, the highest ever paid for any fossil. A nearly complete skeleton known as Stan the T. Tyrannosaurus rex isn’t just a king to paleontologists - the dinosaur increasingly reigns over the world of art auctions.
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