At $26 million, this was ‘probably a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity’, said auctioneer Phyllis Kao. An intense, six-minute, six-way bidding war had sent the price of the lot shooting up to seven times its original estimate, but this looked like the moment. From her vantage point at the lectern at Sotheby’s New York, she raised her gavel before issuing a final warning: ‘It’s the last chance – for all of you – for the juvenile Ceratosaurus nasicornis.’ Then… thwack. ‘Sold.’
Kao turned to Cassandra Hatton, SVP, Vice Chairman, Worldwide Head Science & Natural History at the auction house, who was alongside her on the podium, and asked: ‘Cassandra, do you need a cigarette?’
[Read more: Stegosaurus expected to fetch $6 million in Sotheby’s auction]
The end result of the drama was that an unknown telephone bidder only identified by their paddle number – 439 – had acquired a 150-million-year-old dinosaur skeleton fossil. Including fees and costs, the final sale price was $30.5 million (£22.7 million).
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That July auction was ‘fun, but stressful’ for Hatton, 47. She had sourced the dinosaur, arranged the sale and – she hoped – lined up the bidders. Hatton, who studied French and history at University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), started out selling rare books and manuscripts. But her childhood fascination with dinosaurs growing up in California led her to specialise in prehistoric objects and bringing them to market.
She is the woman who has perhaps done more than anyone to power a recent blockbuster boom in dinosaur fossil auctions, including a 10ft-tall gorgosaurus that sold for $6 million in 2022; a T. rex skull nicknamed ‘Maximus’ that sold for $6.1 million in 2023; and last year’s record-breaking $44.6 million sale of ‘Apex’, a 27ft-long stegosaurus bought by billionaire hedge fund manager Ken Griffin.
[Read more: Gustav Klimt painting fetches $236.4m, becoming second-highest auction sale in history]
Dinosaur fossils are the new must-have item for the global super-rich and slightly less rich celebrities. Some trace the boom in these prehistoric relics to ‘Sue’, a Tyrannosaurus rex nicknamed after Sue Hendrickson, an American fossil hunter who found the fossil in South Dakota in 1990. Sue (the fossilised one) was sold at Sotheby’s in 1997 for $8.3 million, where it was bought not by a billionaire, but by the Field Museum in Chicago, where it is still on permanent public display.
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‘Sue really kickstarted public interest in dinosaurs and the realisation that you could buy them,’ Hatton says in an interview with Spear’s over a scratchy phone line that keeps cutting out. She explains the reason for the poor signal: she’s ‘out west in the desert on a work trip’. She won’t go into further details, as she’s looking at a new dinosaur discovery and doesn’t want others in the fast-growing industry to get wind of it before she’s secured it for a forthcoming auction.
Since the sale of Sue, the ruling family of Abu Dhabi bought Stan, the most complete T. rex skeleton ever found, for a then record-breaking $31.8 million in 2020. It is set to be the star of the Natural History Museum Abu Dhabi, which is scheduled to open on the Emirate’s Saadiyat Island towards the end of 2025.
Stan’s record was shattered by Griffin, the billionaire founder of the Citadel hedge fund. Growing up, Griffin’s favourite toy was a stuffed dinosaur, and memories of that were what led him to bid for Apex. ‘I’ve always loved dinosaurs,’ he said in an interview with Bloomberg. ‘I’ve always been fascinated by this moment in the history of our planet. To make sure that Apex, which was one of the greatest fossils ever found, stayed here in America to inspire generations of children about science was just an opportunity I could not pass up.’
Nicolas Cage, Russell Crowe and Leonardo DiCaprio have also all bought parts of dinosaurs, with Cage and DiCaprio going up against each other at auction in 2007 for a skull of a Tyrannosaurus bataar (a close relative of the T. rex). Cage won, paying $276,000 for the skull, but in 2015 he was forced to give it up after it was found to have been illegally smuggled out of Mongolia.
‘I bought it at a legitimate auction and found out it was abducted from Mongolia illegally, and then I had to give it back,’ he said. ‘Of course it should be awarded to its country of origin. But who knew? Plus, I never got my money back. So that stank.’
Crowe bought the skull of a Mosasaur, a marine reptile, from DiCaprio, who wanted to sell it to fund buying another dinosaur. Crowe told the Howard Stern show that his kids were fascinated with dinosaurs so he agreed to buy it. ‘There was a bunch of vodka involved in that transaction,’ he added.
Hatton says celebrities, billionaires and everyone else who has bought a dinosaur fossil – which can be picked up for as little as £200 for individual teeth – are all united by their ‘childhood wonder of the creatures that walked on Earth the same as we do but millions of years ago’.
‘The link between them all is a curiosity for things that are super-historically, culturally, and scientifically important,’ she says. ‘There are people who are maybe just looking for a dinosaur and it doesn’t really matter if it’s a T. rex or a gorgosaurus or a stegosaurus. [They’ll say] “I just want a dinosaur.”’
But there are others who know almost as much about dinosaurs as palaeontologists do. ‘There are people who really know. They know the different types of dinosaurs, and the difference between a juvenile and an adult. There are also people who are trophy hunting: they want the biggest and the best, whatever the category is. They want the best Giacometti sculpture, the best Picasso, whatever it is, and now the best dinosaur.’
Hatton says buyers generally want to own a dinosaur for what it ‘signals’ about them to the outside world.
‘There’s a difference between buying a dinosaur [and buying] a Picasso,’ she says. ‘There’s a certain group of people who would be really impressed by the Picasso. It’s a very different group of people who are impressed by a rare, not very well known dinosaur. When you buy a dinosaur, you’re buying more than just an object.
‘You’re buying nobility, you’re buying class, you’re buying intelligence, you’re buying curiosity.’ She says buyers want dinosaurs for their beauty, history and curiosity, but also for their pure physicality. ‘People want to be associated with them,’ she says. ‘Dinosaurs are big and they’re powerful and they’re interesting.’
Buyers enjoy showing off their purchases when their friends visit, and Hatton has seen dozens – sometimes hundreds – of fossils at collectors’ homes. ‘It tends to be parts,’ she says, rather than whole skeletons like Apex. ‘Maybe it’s a femur, maybe it’s a skull or a tooth.
Calvin Chu, a collector based in Singapore, has more than 1,000 dinosaur fossils on display in his city centre apartment. ‘I became interested in fossils at age eight, when my mother gave me an SG$20 Moroccan trilobite [an extinct marine arthropod] fossil as a birthday gift,’ he says. ‘It forced me to contemplate deep time: how different the world must have been then and how it has changed so much since. All of this aroused in me a sense of wonder about the ancient world.’
Chu kept buying, and says he’s ‘really fortunate to have an understanding wife who lets me… display skulls in the house’. He also regularly loans items to museums and runs a ‘traveling museum’ to bring fossils into the lives of more people.
Hatton says that most collectors of fossils also want to share their love of dinosaurs with other people. ‘Once we start getting into full dinosaurs, those tend to be loaned or donated to museums. Going back to what you get out of the purchase beyond owning the object – a big part of the motivation is sharing things with the public.
‘A lot of the people that I deal with remember their first time going into the Natural History Museum, and being blown away by the T. rex or whatever they saw,’ she adds. ‘It’s that nostalgia for that sense of wonder and excitement, and that they get to be the person who then gets to give that gift to another kid. They [owners] are like, “Wow. I own the biggest stegosaurus in the world, or the only juvenile ceratosaurus. I get to own that, but I also get to know that I have placed that in a public space and all these kids who come in with their grandparents get to see it and get that feeling that I had.”
‘That’s an awesome gift that most people don’t get to give. If you are someone of means, you can buy art, and you can buy a beautiful home, and you can buy a lot of experiences. But having the ability to have an impact on other people’s emotions is just next level.
Griffin is someone with the means to do just that. With an estimated $48 billion fortune, he is the 32nd-richest person on the planet. He has loaned Apex to the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH) on New York’s Upper West Side, a moderate walk through Central Park from his $238 million penthouse apartment in the 220 Central Park South tower.
The fossil – the largest stegosaurus skeleton ever discovered – is on public display for a minimum of four years. Griffin, 56, also donated additional funds to support the installation and for scientific and educational research into the dinosaur. It is displayed in a new entrance named the Kenneth C. Griffin Exploration Atrium.
Sean Decatur, the AMNH’s president, is thrilled to have Apex on view and ‘grateful to Ken Griffin for his commitment to sharing this magnificent specimen with the public. Mr Griffin brings a strong sense of civic responsibility, a deep love of and support for science, and an understanding of the power of museums, including ours, to inspire wonder and spur innovation.
However, not all scientists welcomed Griffin’s loan or billionaires’ entry into the dinosaur market more widely.
Stuart Sumida, the president of the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology and a professor of vertebrate biology at California State University San Bernardino, was one of dozens of palaeontologists to write publicly to the AMNH expressing their unease at the museum’s acceptance of Apex on a temporary loan.
‘The Society of Vertebrate Paleontology (SVP) strongly opposes the AMNH’s plans for the privately owned stegosaurus specimen known as Apex,’ wrote Sumida. ‘It sets a dangerous precedent by legitimizing private ownership of vertebrate fossils and may incentivize future sales of similar fossils by increasing their perceived market value. This has occurred previously: after the Tyrannosaurus rex specimen Baby Bob was publicly displayed and studied at the University of Kansas, its scientific and public value were exploited to drive up its sale price.’
The private sale of dinosaur fossils, he argued, had left museums unable to compete on price and therefore ‘undermines their mission to preserve Earth’s history and limits access for researchers and the public alike’.
In the US and the UK, fossils are generally the property of the landowner, and it is legal for them to be sold privately. Often landowners in areas with high density of fossils sell licences to fossil hunters to access their land. However, in many other countries including China, Mongolia, Australia, Brazil and Argentina, it is illegal to export fossils.
Steve Brusatte, professor of palaeontology and evolution at the University of Edinburgh, says the rapid march of billionaires into the dinosaur fossil market was a threat to science. ‘When I saw the price tag [of the Sotheby’s ceratosaurus] the number shocked me,’ he tells Spear’s. ‘I love dinosaurs as much as anyone, but a skeleton like this fetching $30 million was a stunner. Who has that kind of money to spend on a dinosaur? Certainly not any museums or educational institutions.
‘While I’m pleased that the buyer might loan the skeleton to a museum to be put on display, at this point it is just a vague suggestion. The buyer is still anonymous. My fear is that this skeleton will disappear into the ether, into the mansion of an oligarch or a bank vault to accumulate value as just another investment in the portfolio of a hedge fund, and not see the light of day until it’s auctioned again, or maybe never at all.’
Brusatte, 41, who is originally from Illinois but has lived in Edinburgh since 2013, says he understood why the Mountain America Museum of Ancient Life, a small private museum in Utah that owned the ceratosaurus, decided to sell it in order to raise funds, but he fears it could set a dangerous precedent.
‘Museum, university, science, and educational budgets in America are being obliterated at the moment by a hostile government, and if one of the consequences is museums seeing their collections and exhibits as assets to keep the bills paid, then we are in very dangerous territory for science and education,’ he says. ‘Bottom line: a world where dinosaur skeletons can fetch tens of millions of dollars within a few minutes at auctions is not a world where dinosaurs will long be accessible to educate and inspire everyone. They will become playthings for the über-wealthy, and in many ways already are.’
However, others in the industry say the money generated by private sales enhances scientific research and encourages excavation of new dinosaur fossils that might otherwise have been lost to the sands of time.
‘Let’s not make it about dinosaurs, but any other kind of object,’ says Hatton. ‘You have a group of people who are mad that it’s not being given to them for free. I think we can all agree that’s a little weird, right?
‘The truth of the matter is, in the United States, whoever owns the land owns the dinosaur. It takes time and resources to excavate these, and if they’re not excavated they’re lost to erosion. So I like to turn that question around and say, “OK, would you prefer that this dinosaur is lost to everyone? Because it will be if commercial palaeontologists aren’t excavating them, because you guys aren’t.”’
