Fossils are fetching high prices at auction, as anonymous buyers bid millions for a piece of history and a dash of celebrity 

by STEVE BRUSATTE 

AROUND 110 million years ago, a dinosaur went hunting. Stalking through ferns along a riverbank, he twitched his nose to the wind and caught scent of a plant-eater ahead. His head darted upward. His eyes locked on the target. 

The dinosaur drew his sickle claws upward, ready to make a lethal strike. But something wasn’t right. The ground was sinking. His legs were trapped in sand and mud. Limbs flailing, the hunter slid deeper and vanished under the ooze. 

It was not the last time this dinosaur disappeared. 

Over eons, his bones solidified and became fossils. Then, a little more than a decade ago, a pair of fossil hunters dug up a patch of land in Montana. With brushes, hammers and chisels, the pair painstakingly unearthed 126 bones, revealing a fossilised Deinonychus, the fierce carnivore that inspired the terrifying “Velociraptors” in the novel and movie “Jurassic Park”. The fossil was of serious scientific importance. Endowed with celebrity, it had significant monetary value too. 

When the dinosaur, nicknamed ‘Hector,’ was put up for auction in 2022 at Christie’s in New York, an anonymous buyer paid US$12.4 million (RM53.35 million) — twice the auction house’s estimate. Immediately afterward, the specimen was whisked away, its whereabouts and ownership unknown. 

Hector is one of many dinosaurs to hit the auction block in a recent spate. From just a smattering of auctions in the 2000s, sales ramped up in the past decade or so. Today, there are two or three major sales each year, and the sums involved are gargantuan. 

In the past five years alone, buyers at auctions have paid: US$6 million for a Gorgosaurus, the close cousin of Tyrannosaurus rex; US$8 million for the remains of a Triceratops nicknamed ‘Big John’; and US$31.8 million for ‘Stan,’ a bona fide T. rex skeleton. 

Not every auction is a roaring success — the sale of a T. rex skull in 2022 fell well below its pre-auction estimate, though it still went for a staggering US$6.1 million. 

In July this year, a new auction record was set: ‘Apex,’ a plate-backed Stegosaurus, fetched US$45 million. The sale price was the most ever for a dinosaur fossil and reflected the fact Apex was one of the largest and most complete skeletons of its kind ever found. While many buyers are incognito, the new owner of Apex was not. 

The dinosaur now belongs to Ken Griffin — hedge fund manager, political mega-donor and one of the wealthiest men in the world. 

A New Asset Class 

These sales make one thing clear: Fossilised dinosaurs are emerging as a new asset class, subject to the whim of the market, exposed to the laws of supply and demand. 

Like works of art, fine wine and sporting memorabilia, fossils too can be sold to the highest bidder, regardless of the scientific consequences. Their value is hard to pinpoint exactly — each fossil is unique, and there is a paucity of market data on which to base sale estimates — but the rarity and fascination of good fossils has helped boost the price that rich collectors, or investors, are willing to pay. 

For sure, when it comes to fossils, the scientific mission has long been intertwined with the interests of wealthy benefactors. 

The Bone Wars of the late 19th century comprised a rush to find the best fossils between competing hunters backed by rich families. 

In 1899, workers dispatched by steel baron Andrew Carnegie to find the world’s biggest dinosaur duly delivered: Diplodocus carnegii became the centrepiece of Pittsburgh’s Carnegie Museum of Natural History. Childs Frick, the son of another industrialist, subsidised the collection of hundreds of thousands of fossils, which he himself studied as a palaeontologist at New York’s American Museum of Natural History. 

More recently, billionaire David Koch financed the refurbishment of the dinosaur galleries at the American Museum and the National Museum of Natural History in Washington. 

This time, though, is different. For the most part, private fossil buyers aren’t building new public collections or subsidising the work of museums. 

When a dinosaur is bought for millions, the money goes to the seller and the auction house. It doesn’t contribute to a grander purpose, to discovering or learning new things. It is wealth transferred between private bank accounts. None of it trickles down to museums of academics in need of funding. 

Proponents of fossils as an asset class might claim that there are plenty more yet to be dug up — after all, only a few dozen T. rex specimens have ever been uncovered — and that a more commercial bent to dinosaur hunting would yield greater results. But commercialisation and the influence of market forces bring dangers to the surface too. 

Palaeontologists like me worry that fossils that are tens of millions of years old need expert conservation skills that can’t easily be replicated in a private collection, for instance. What’s more, we’re concerned that fossils owned by private collectors will no longer be readily accessible for scientific inquiry. 

This is important. When a palaeontologist proposes a theory about a dinosaur — the hypothetical hunting scene I outline at the start of this piece, for instance — it is based on detailed analysis of the fossils and the area in which they’re discovered. 

In the same way that forensic detectives piece together a crime scene from tiny fibres and fragments of evidence, palaeontologists can derive clues about a dinosaur’s life, age, eating habits, environment and its death, all from detailed inspection of the actual fossil record. CAT scans, digital models and micro-scopic examination of wafer-thin slices of the bones can help us to deduce how smart or how old a dinosaur was. Tiny chemical samples of teeth can infer its diet and body temperature too. 

‘Sue’ the Tyrannosaurus Rex skeleton on exhibit in great entrance hall of the Field Museum, Chicago

Fossils Inspire 

It is also important for scientific debate that access to these fossils is ongoing. Scientists need to see and critique evidence for themselves. That is what science is — not a collection of facts to be memorised, but open inquiry, where constant framing and testing of ideas helps us better understand how the world works. 

When a fossil disappears into a private collection, it is potentially lost to a generation or more. There can be no further questioning. 

As a home for fossils, museums deliver for non-scientists too. Fossils inspire. They capture the imagination of people from all walks of life, of all ages. 

When I was a teenager, I was smitten by ‘Sue’, a T. rex displayed at the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago. Sue was not collected by museum scientists; she was purchased at auction for US$8.4 million in 1997. The museum had afforded the hefty price only with the backing of a handful of sponsors. 

Millions of people have now seen Sue. A few, like me, became palaeontologists. But many others that experienced a real dinosaur up-close-and-personal surely left pondering the mysteries of evolution and extinction and our own place in the universe. 

In hindsight, the pricey sale of Sue the T. rex possibly lit the fuse on today’s fossil market mania. Since then, the more valuable dinosaurs have become, the more science competes with the distorting effects of money. 

While fossils potentially disappearing into private collections is one big concern, the lure of large sums of money for fossil finds is at least as consequential for those more interested in scientific discovery. 

Already some ranchers and farmers that have previously permitted academic palaeontologists to dig on their land pro bono are demanding a slice of the multi-million-dollar action. 

It is likely inevitable that a group of cowboy fossil hunters end up destroying important scientific context in the greedy search for valuable dinosaur bones. 

It is possible that a more commercial fossil hunting will focus on the pieces that will fetch the most at auction, even if other, more scientifically important bones are left buried, or just discarded. 

It all makes for a depressing situation for palaeontologists, educators and the public, as market forces threaten to ride roughshod over valuable scientific territory. 

While some countries don’t permit private dinosaur hunting — there are prohibitions in China and Mongolia, for instance — there is not much in the way of regulation that can withstand the onslaught of the market in the US, where most auctioned fossils are unearthed. 

This is sensible. Rules that prohibit owning or collecting fossils would be coun- terproductive. Alongside gawking at dinosaurs in museums, amateur fossil hunting, for shark teeth, corals and other fossilised remains, is a valuable experience for proto scientists. It sure was for me. 

Curbing the free market without curbing the curiosity of an enthusiastic next generation of palaeontologists would be an impossible mission. But leaving the field unregulated and open to the full effect of the market is potentially damaging too. 

Hedge Fund Owners 

And yet, for me, palaeontology remains an exercise in positivity. Searching the planet for hidden bones from a hundred million years ago is an arduous and often futile process. 

The optimist’s view on recent sales is that some specimens may end up on public display. Stan, the T. rex , is to be exhibited at a new Natural History Museum Abu Dhabi, slated to open in 2025. 

Ken Griffin has said he is looking to loan Apex to a US institution. There is a complexity to these outcomes too. If a dinosaur is owned by a private individual, and loaned to a museum, could it be sold on again? Will it be loaned for a short period or permanently? Will scientists be given access? 

When Hector the Deinonychus was sold to an unnamed buyer in 2022, palaeontologists worried the fossil would be lost to science altogether. 

But slowly, over time, details of Hector’s whereabouts began to emerge once more. In online forums and social media, rumours stated that a Deinonychus was displayed at a science museum in Hong Kong. Photos confirmed the skeleton was Hector. Layer by layer, more information came to the surface. 

A caption on a photo on the museum website referred to Vegasoul Capital Management — a Hong Kong-based hedge fund and quant trading firm. 

A press release mentioned a Vegasoul executive in attendance at the opening of an exhibition featuring Hector. 

Another executive who answered a call to the hedge fund’s office confirmed Vegasoul was the owner. What about other details? Was the dinosaur an investment? Under what conditions would Vegasoul sell the fossil again? The hedge fund executive declined to comment, burying Hector the Deinonychus under layers of mystery yet one more time. — Bloomberg