A nearly complete skeleton of the Apex Stegosaurus, standing 11 feet tall and measuring 27 feet long, sold to Ken Griffin at a New York Sotheby’s auction for a record $44.6 million. This amount far exceeded the initial lot price of $6 million, as reported by the Independent.
The Stegosaurus is the best-known armored dinosaur, easily recognized by its distinctive profile: spikes on its tail and bony plates along its back, stretching from its neck to its tail.
In May 2022, the largest Stegosaurus fossil in the world, named Apex, was discovered by paleontologist Jason Cooper in the Morrison Formation in Colorado. This nearly complete skeleton, dating to about 150 million years ago, consists of 254 well-preserved bones (out of a total of 319). Experts found that the adult dinosaur suffered from rheumatoid arthritis.
In 2018, Mr. Griffin donated $16.5 million to the Field Museum in Chicago to fund an exhibition of a Tyrannosaurus rex—the largest dinosaur ever discovered.
The New York auction house Sotheby’s was the first to auction a Tyrannosaurus skeleton, nicknamed Sue, back in 1997.
The previous world record for the purchase price of a dinosaur fossil was set in 2020 at a Christie’s auction, when a 67-million-year-old skeleton sold for nearly $32 million.
The identity of the buyer was first revealed by the Wall Street Journal.
