How to buy a dinosaur

I shouldn’t think many people meet Tracey without wanting to touch her. She’s only a half-skull, glued together from fragments, yet there’s something mesmerisingly solid about her. She’s 7ft from nose to frill, heavy as cathedral limestone, and, notwithstanding her lined and pitted surface, smooth as driftwood. The closer you peer, the more your neck tingles. All those millions of years, and the skull still glows with structural integrity, each curve, cavity and point flowing naturally from the whole.

Would she shatter, like a Jeff Koons dog, if I accidentally knocked her off the stand? You don’t want to risk it: not with a £125,000 price tag. Yet this, it turns out, is a bargain by recent standards. Sotheby’s sold a complete triceratops skull in New York last April for $504,000. Six months earlier, a triceratops skeleton, skull and all, was sold by Binoche et Giquello in Paris for €6.65 million. And that’s just a triceratops, a harmless herbivore. If you’re looking for a statement predator — a Tyrannosaurus rex, say — a fossilised skeleton could cost you tens of millions.

Has the collecting world gone stone-cold crazy? Far from it, says James Hyslop, head of scientific instruments, globes and natural history at Christie’s in London. “If you go back to the early 20th century, when all those big, famous species like T. rex or triceratops were discovered, the prices paid by the big American and European museums for those specimens were almost on a par with the top paintings in the world.” Yet today’s market is, he concedes, buoyant to the point of exuberance. “When I joined Christie’s, in 2007, the going rate for a triceratops was about half a million dollars. Now it’s $6 million. Yet if you look at where the most expensive fossils are today versus the most expensive paintings, we’re still a long way from Peak Dinosaur.”

Prices have been rising steadily since the late Nineties. Some blame Steven Spielberg’s Jurassic Park, released in 1993. A more specific catalyst was an auction in New York in October 1997. A 65-million-year-old T. rex skeleton, nicknamed Sue after the fossil hunter who found it in western South Dakota, went up for sale at Sotheby’s. Nine bidders did battle for nine frenzied minutes. Chicago’s Field Museum of Natural History came out on top, with a winning bid of $8.36 million.

That bid, made possible by financial backing from Disney and McDonald’s, shook the fossil world, and another tyrannosaurus auction three years later — on eBay, with an asking price of $8 million — reinforced the sense of a new going rate (even though that specimen ended up being sold privately, almost certainly for much less). Every prospector, every dealer, every collector, every auctioneer — everyone involved now knew that, potentially, the right dinosaur fossil could generate riches out of all proportion to the (not-inconsiderable) cost of getting it out of the ground. That kind of knowledge never goes back in the bottle.

The buzz attracted unexpected enthusiasts. Russell Crowe, Leonardo DiCaprio and Nicolas Cage acquired dinosaur fossils. Opportunist suppliers rushed to source specimens from all over the world, some with more regard than others for procedural niceties. A few people got their fingers burnt: Cage (outbidding DiCaprio) paid $276,000 for the skull of a Tarbosaurus bataar in 2007 but agreed eight years later to give it back, after it emerged that it had been exported illegally from Mongolia. (All exports of fossil material from Mongolia are illegal.) In 2012, meanwhile, the respected British fossil hunter Chris Moore — who runs a small fossil shop in Charmouth, Dorset — voluntarily returned several crates of material to Mongolia after becoming involved as a middleman in a scheme to import fossil material to the US via China and the UK. The scheme’s US mastermind, Eric Prokopi, was later jailed for making false customs declarations. (Moore, however, had broken no laws: you can import fossils from wherever you like, as long as you declare them correctly.)

Prokopi’s activities made headlines after representatives of the Mongolian government tried to interrupt an auction in Chelsea, New York, at which one of Prokopi’s imports, a T. bataar skeleton, was briefly sold for $1.1 million. The specimen was later impounded and in due course returned to its land of origin. The scandal could have shaken market confidence. Instead, prices have soared.

In October 2020 another T. rex from South Dakota, marginally more complete than Sue but not spectacularly so, was sold at Christie’s New York for $31.8 million. The anonymous purchaser has never been identified, although Stan, as this specimen was nicknamed, has since been seen in Abu Dhabi, where it is due to be displayed in a new museum on Saadiyat Island from 2025.

Then, last May, Christie’s sold a 110-million-year-old Deinonychus antirrhopus skeleton (Hector), much smaller than Stan and less complete, for $12.4 million. One leading palaeontologist, Steve Brusatte at the University of Edinburgh, described the price as “deranged”.

“The international art market has only recently woken up to this category,” Hyslop says — and sellers are increasingly targeting that market. The record-breaking sale of Stan, for example, was the culmination of a 20th Century Evening Sale at Christie’s, in which multimillion-dollar works by Cézanne, Van Gogh, Picasso, Rothko and Jackson Pollock were also auctioned; and when Sotheby’s sold a T. rex skull for $6.1 million in December, it was part of its New York Luxury Week.

In London, meanwhile, high-value dinosaur fossils (including a £1 million camptosaurus skeleton) have been sold at the Frieze London and Masterpiece art fairs, often by dealers — such as Salomon Aaron of David Aaron Gallery — usually associated with fine art and antiquities. There’s an obvious logic to this. Many fossils have a powerfully sculptural quality, and, says Aaron, standing between a juvenile triceratops skull (£650,000) and a small but vicious-looking othnielosaurus (price on application) in his elegantly minimalist Berkeley Square gallery, “just because something isn’t man-made doesn’t mean it can’t be beautiful to look at”.

“Some specimens really do speak to the soul,” Hyslop says. But big dinosaurs also send a powerful message about their owner. It’s like having your own Monet or Rothko, but more assertive. “You don’t have to explain anything,” says Cassandra Hatton, global head of science and popular culture at Sotheby’s. “Somebody can come into your home and just go, ‘Wow!’ ”

Prices reflect many things: rarity, completeness, size. But it’s the “Wow!” factor that matters most these days, because that’s what the big spenders want.

Hatton lures them to her sales with an umbrella brief that includes fossils, meteorites, movie and hip-hop memorabilia, space travel collectibles, medical curios, old computers, rare books, Nobel prize medals — often in the same auction. Sales she takes pride in include $2.8 million for the jacket Buzz Aldrin wore to the moon and back, $6.1 million for a gorgosaurus, and $5.4 million for the source code for the World Wide Web (as a non-fungible token).

This cocktail of tastes is more widely shared than you might expect. At Extraordinary Objects in Cambridge, for example, fossils like Tracey can be viewed (or purchased) alongside artworks by Banksy, Grayson Perry, Gilbert & George and the like. On a grander scale, in Italy, visitors invited to Theatrum Mundi, in Arezzo, can marvel at creatively displayed dinosaurs — an allosaurus and a diplodocus “fighting” — in an exotic setting that also features space-race curios (a Soviet spacesuit), Hollywood memorabilia (an original Star Wars lightsaber), rare books, paintings and anthropological oddities.

Such collections draw on the tradition of cabinets of wonders. But the real attraction is the chance to amaze guests and leave them speechless

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Such collections draw on the tradition of “Wunderkammern” — cabinets of wonders — that were fashionable in the enlightened courts of 16th and 17th-century Europe. Their ostensible purpose was to bring an understanding of the wider world to the court: “Thus your Excellency shall have added depth of knowledge to the fineness of your spirits and greatness of your power” (as Francis Bacon put it). But the real attraction, then as now, was the chance (in the words of Theatrum Mundi’s founder, Luca Cableri) to “amaze guests and leave them speechless”.

A similar mash-up of categories can be found at another invitation-only gallery, Wunderkammer Zürich, whose founder, Christian D Link, also organises an annual Out of This World sale at Koller, Switzerland’s biggest auction house. The latest, last month, was a feast of “wonders”: fossils, meteorites, precious stones, space travel “relics”, Hollywood memorabilia, stuffed birds, ancient Egyptian sarcophagus masks, a bicycle once ridden by Eddy Merckx. The highlight was a much-hyped T. rex skeleton, TRX-293 Trinity, which sold for a slightly disappointing CHF4.8 million, no doubt reflecting the fact that it was a composite of three specimens.

Link is a former professional magician, which may explain the air of mystery with which he fails to tell me much about how TRX-293 came into his hands. “A guy I know, he knows a guy . . . He asked me, do you want a T. rex?” The specimen “was meant to go to an exhibition, but they had some issues”; the seller was “a private individual who decided to part with it”; the middleman was “a European”. In the auction business, Link explains, “discretion is everything”.

But there is no disguising his belief that the wonders of natural history are there to be collected and marvelled at. “I was always fascinated by the idea of creating your own worlds, made of objects,” he says. This aesthetically led approach does not endear him to the significant number of palaeontologists who believe that, actually, dinosaur fossils are there to be studied. The US Society of Vertebrate Paleontology (SVP), which represents more than 200 palaeontologists worldwide, has called (in vain) for several recent dinosaur auctions to be stopped, or at least “restricted to bidders from institutions committed to curating specimens for the public good and in perpetuity”. Selling such specimens into private hands, in its view, results in them being “potentially lost to science”.

Hyslop plays down such concerns. “Most collectors want to share their specimens with the world,” he says, and Christie’s has often facilitated loan arrangements between purchaser and museum. Yet American palaeontologists, in particular, are reluctant to work with privately owned specimens and peer-reviewed journals rarely publish such work, because, as the SVP puts it, “future access cannot be guaranteed” and “the essence of science is replicability”. One American professor, Kenshu Shimada of DePaul University in Illinois, has described the commercialisation of fossil-collecting as “the greatest threat to palaeontology in the 21st century”. Another, Thomas Carr of Carthage College in Kenosha, Wisconsin, has compared selling to private collectors to burning books.

Others take a more nuanced view. “Dinosaurs are awesome,” Brusatte says. “I totally get why you might want your own. The problem is where there’s a very scientifically valuable, rare, one-of-a-kind fossil, and that fossil is sold off to somebody and disappears from public view. I know of specimens that have basically disappeared.” Examples might include the $12.4 million deinonychus sold by Christie’s and the $6.1 million gorgosaurus sold by Sotheby’s last year. For all that most of us know about their whereabouts, they might as well be back in the ground. “That’s a loss to science,” Brusatte says. “It’s a loss to education. It’s a loss to the public. We don’t know if we’ll ever know where they are.”

Yet the issue is not clear-cut. Some privately owned dinosaurs have been lent to museums with great success. Tristan Otto, the vast T. rex skeleton that’s the prize exhibit at the Museum für Naturkunde in Berlin, is the property of the London-based Danish financier Niels Nielsen and his friend Jens Peter Jenssen. Arkhane, the allosaurus displayed in recent years at the Institut Royal des Sciences Naturelles de Belgique in Brussels, belongs to a French fund manager who bought him at auction in Paris in 2018. And Big John, a giant triceratops that used to be cited as “lost” after being sold to an anonymous American for €6.65 million by Binoche et Giquello in Paris in 2021, recently turned up in Florida, where its new owner, Siddhartha Pagidipati, is lending it to the Glazer Children’s Museum in Tampa for a three-year exhibition.

Dan O’Dowd, a US tech billionaire who owns a T. rex called Samson, thinks the academic enemies of private collecting are “ridiculous”. He would be delighted for scientists to study Samson, “but they say, ‘No, we can’t look at it’.” And yet, O’Dowd points out, “That’s how these things get found. We don’t find them because, you know, PhDs are scrambling around in holes in South Dakota looking for bones. They’re almost all found by private collectors and fossil hunters who go out and find them. These guys are doing it for money.”

“We must guard against hypocrisy,” Professor Paul Barrett, at the Natural History Museum in London, says. “Almost every major museum collection in the world is based on specimens that that museum has bought from a commercial dealer” — while others, including the Natural History Museum’s, have grown from specimens donated by private collectors.

What’s harder to dismiss is the worry that, as Brusatte puts it, “once people hear about these high price tags, that puts dollar signs in their eyes”. Last year, the Malta-registered Apeiron Investment Group was reported to have launched a Jurassic Fund One, with the purpose of investing in excavations and buying the resulting specimens “like real estate”. In fact, Apeiron decided not to go ahead with the fund; but the mindset behind it persists. “Dinosaur fossils are the ultimate collectible,” says Christian Angermayer, Apeiron’s German founder, who personally owns a tyrannosaurus, a diplodocus and a triceratops skull. They have a great track record as investments too. Just look at the going rate for a triceratops, up 1,200 per cent in 15 years.

But, Aaron says, “indiscriminate price rises aren’t in the interests of a sustainable market. We want discriminate price increases, for things that warrant it.” The trouble is, the higher the expected returns, the stronger the temptation to cut corners. Last November Christie’s hastily withdrew a tyrannosaurus skeleton from an auction in Hong Kong, days before bidding commenced. Known as Shen, the specimen was expected to fetch $15 million to $25 million. Then doubts were expressed about what proportion of the bones were replicas. A few days later, another tyrannosaurus, Ryker, was abruptly pulled from a planned exhibition at the Musée des Confluences in Lyons, pending “further research”. The full facts of both episodes have yet to emerge. But there are, warns Nielsen, “a lot of bad actors in this space”.

And even the good actors can suffer in the ruthless scramble. Terry Ciotka, the Canadian dealer who sold Nielsen the tyrannosaurus now known as Tristan Otto, ended up on the receiving end of a speculative lawsuit — claiming a share of the proceeds — that took years to defeat. And Peter Larson, the Dakota fossil hunter whose Black Hills Institute unearthed Sue and Stan, faced lawsuits in connection with both specimens — and missed out on most of their record-breaking proceeds.

Yet the market seems unfazed by the threat of litigation or scandal. “You just have to do your due diligence,” Hyslop says. That means making sure that each stage of your target specimen’s journey from the ground to saleroom was fully compliant with the laws of its land of origin. Anything from Mongolia, China and Canada is a non-starter; the US, on the other hand, produces clear, reliable paper trails of ownership — and a steady stream of big, exciting specimens from its western states. “A huge part of what I do is just mountains of paperwork,” Hatton says. “You know, land title documents, title transfer agreements, copies of every export licence . . .”

When the provenance is watertight, a top-of-the-range dinosaur is one of the more sober “investments of passion”. It’s low maintenance (“They’re just stones,” O’Dowd says). It holds its value well compared with other luxuries. It can even be good for business.

Kléber Rossillon, the French heritage tycoon, displays his 150-million-year-old allosaurus (bought for €1.13 million in 2016) as a visitor attraction at the Jardins de Marqueyssac, one of 12 historic sites his company manages. Next stop, some suspect, may be the wholly corporate dinosaur, purchased to project the brand — like the €548,250 mammoth skeleton with which Soprema, the waterproofing group, celebrates its mammoth logo at its Strasbourg HQ.

O’Dowd keeps Samson at the Santa Barbara HQ of his company, Green Hills Software. Only the skull of the tyrannosaurus is on display: the lobby isn’t big enough for the rest. Even so, he says, “it’s a great talking point. And it’s pretty impressive.”

He bought his trophy dinosaur during the 2008-09 financial crisis. “I read that it was up for auction in Las Vegas, for about $8 million, but it didn’t sell. So I called Bonhams.” It turned out that the specimen had been used as collateral for a property deal and the bank had foreclosed. “The bank didn’t want to wait for the best price. They just wanted cash by the end of the week.” He has been savouring his rock-bottom purchase ever since. “It was a really good deal,” he purrs.

Perhaps the present turmoil in the banking sector will produce comparable bargains — although you’ll need a lot of ready cash to profit from them. But the great thing about natural history is that its wonders come in many sizes. At Christie’s Sculpted by Nature online auction, for example, you have until May 24 to bid for anything from charming gogotte formations for a few thousand pounds to a new genus of pterosaur (estimate: about £100,000) or a “sculptural” triceratops skull (£300,000-£500,000). Or for the biggest spenders, there’s said to be something more showstopping coming up at Sotheby’s, New York, in July. But whatever your budget, you’re unlikely to see the value of your purchase go down. “There are very few things that I think will be super-valuable in future and aren’t susceptible to trends,” Hatton says. “But I think dinosaurs are one of them.”
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