The most expensive dinosaur fossil ever sold at auction, a stegosaurus that billionaire Kenneth Griffin bought over the summer for $44.6 million, has a new home: the American Museum of Natural History in New York.
The museum announced Thursday that it would be the first institution to exhibit the sought-after stegosaurus, as part of a four-year loan from Griffin.
“It’s one of the dinosaurs that every kid knows how to draw,” Sean M. Decatur, the museum’s president, said in an interview this week before the dinosaur was revealed. “This is a unique opportunity to have something that simultaneously, I think, really resonates in the public imagination about dinosaurs, but also from a research standpoint, is really a pretty special specimen to understand.”
The mounted stegosaurus was revealed from behind a billowing beige curtain Thursday morning to reporters, photographers, museum employees and a group of elementary school children. It is scheduled to go on view to the public Sunday after it is fully prepared for exhibition.
The Sotheby’s sale of the unusually complete specimen — which is nicknamed Apex — shattered records in the booming fossil market. And it established a new king of the dinosaur world, at least in the eyes of the auction market: The stegosaurus dethroned the Tyrannosaurus rex, the previous record-holder.
But the auction also stoked fears among academic paleontologists that museums and universities were being priced out of their research field by well-heeled private collectors. After purchasing the stegosaurus, Griffin, the founder and CEO of the hedge fund Citadel, said he intended to lend the specimen to an American institution so it would be available to scientists and the public.
In a statement about the museum loan, Griffin said, “I am grateful that millions of visitors and researchers will now be able to see and learn from this magnificent specimen of the late Jurassic period.”
Griffin’s loan includes funding that will go toward researching and documenting the specimen, including 3D scans of the fossilized bones that the museum says it intends to make accessible to researchers.
But it was not immediately clear how the wider scientific community would view the plans for Apex. Some paleontologists have expressed concerns in the past about doing research on privately owned specimens, since there is rarely a guarantee that they will remain accessible to researchers in the future.
Stuart Sumida, the president of the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology, said that “we have an internal ethics committee that is grappling with the situation right now.”
He said that the ethics committee would deliver a recommendation about how to handle loaned fossils like Apex as soon as early spring. “This is a new gray area for us,” he said.
The commercial fossil market has been on the rise for years. In 2020, the market was jolted by the sale of a T. rex skeleton called Stan that fetched a record $31.8 million, setting off a gold rush for dinosaur fossils in the American West. Stan ended up going to a natural history museum being built in Abu Dhabi, the capital of the United Arab Emirates.
Apex became one of the world’s most famous dinosaurs in July when it beat Stan’s price at auction. Sotheby’s had estimated that the stegosaurus would sell for $4 million to $6 million. But a bidding war broke out and Apex wound up selling for more than 10 times the low estimate, stunning the paleontological community.
Eager to feature the celebrity dinosaur, the American Museum of Natural History reached out in the summer to Griffin, a major donor, to find out whether he had decided where he wanted the fossil displayed. “We were happy to learn that the decision had not been made,” Decatur said.
Roughly the size of an elephant, Apex was quietly unloaded from wooden crates and assembled this week in relative secrecy inside the museum’s Richard Gilder Center for Science, Education and Innovation.
The plate-backed, spiky-tailed herbivore is said to have walked the Earth about 150 million years ago in what is present-day Colorado.
At 11 feet tall and more than 20 feet long, it will not be the largest specimen to haunt the museum halls, but officials hope that its recognizable outlines will draw people to its exhibits and gift shop and provide valuable data for researchers.
“We want to figure out how it grows,” said Roger Benson, a curator of paleontology at the museum, who is planning to analyze a 10-centimeter wedge from the dinosaur’s femur that he hopes will aid research in learning about stegosaurus growth patterns and the extinct creature’s biology.
The American Museum of Natural History’s loan agreement will allow scientists to document the specimen by creating 3D scans of the skeleton. The museum also plans to commission a replica cast of Apex that it can display after the loan ends and the genuine fossil is relocated.
Benson noted that the ability to share the data was a key condition of the loan. “I didn’t think we could do this project if we weren’t able to make the 3D data available to researchers,” he said.
The museum had a “stated commitment” from Griffin that his intention was that the specimen would continue to be available to researchers, Benson said.
New York marks a long journey for the stegosaurus, which was discovered by commercial paleontologist Jason Cooper in 2022 on his property near the town of Dinosaur, Colorado.
Paleontologists recognize that the specimen does not hold the same public allure as the T. rex, but it remains fixed in popular culture, thanks in part to appearances in franchises like “Jurassic Park” and “The Land Before Time.”
Benson said he viewed Apex as scientifically valuable in part because of its larger size compared with other specimens and its completeness; according to the museum, Apex contains about 254 fossil bone elements out of an approximate total of 320.
Cassandra Hatton, a Sotheby’s executive who helped organize the auction, said that Apex surpassed its estimate because potential buyers like Griffin had a clear view of its provenance. In this case, the auction house had been involved since the dinosaur’s discovery.
“Apex was fresh out of the ground, offered with full rights,” Hatton said. “And buyers were coming to me asking for transparency in the market.”
Griffin’s choice to lend the stegosaurus to the American Museum of Natural History was perhaps surprising, given that his name is already on dinosaur exhibits at the Field Museum in Chicago. While Griffin has supported other scientific endeavors at the American Museum of Natural History, this is his first partnership with its paleontology department.
Until next fall, Apex will be stationed near the entrance of the Gilder Center within an atrium named after Griffin in recognition of his previous donations. Then the specimen will be moved to a longer-term location on the fourth floor, where it will welcome visitors into the museum’s fossil halls.
Benson, the museum’s paleontologist, said he viewed the loan as a way of working to bring the worlds of commercial and academic paleontology together in the name of science. “To me it seems really important to try to bridge the gap and make the most of the scientific opportunity,” he said.
Published in The New York Times on 6 December 2024. Reprinted with permission.