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Ken Griffin, the Citadel hedge fund founder, has paid $44.6mn for a 150mn-year-old stegosaurus known as “Apex”, making it the most valuable fossil ever sold at auction.
The fossil — which is 11ft tall and 27ft long — surpassed its presale low estimate by more than 11 times, according to Sotheby’s, the New York auction house, on Wednesday.
While the bidder was officially anonymous, a person familiar with Griffin’s plans confirmed the purchase and said he intended to put it on display at a US museum. “Apex was born in America and is going to stay in America,” Griffin told the auction house, which it cited in a press release about the sale.
This is not Griffin’s first venture into dinosaurs. In 2018, he gave $16.5mn to the Field Museum in Chicago to fund the display of a cast of the biggest dinosaur ever discovered, an Argentine herbivore known as a titanosaur. Griffin also paid $43.2mn for a copy of the US Constitution in 2021 and loaned it to the Crystal Bridges Museum in Arkansas.
The specimen sold on Wednesday was discovered in Dinosaur, Colorado, and is mostly intact. The stegosaurus is believed to have lived to an advanced age, displaying signs of arthritis.
Wednesday’s auction has underlined the rising interest in collecting fossils and the steep prices buyers are willing to pay for some of the most impressive ones available for sale to private collectors.
The first dinosaur to be sold at auction was “Sue” the Tyrannosaurus rex in 1997, also at Sotheby’s. The fossil fetched $8.4mn and is now on display at the Field Museum. “Stan,” a male Tyrannosaurus rex, was sold for $31.8mn at Christie’s in 2020 to the government of Abu Dhabi for a new museum there.
Fossils have caught the attention of some celebrities, including Leonardo DiCaprio and Nicolas Cage, who were up against each other in a bidding battle to secure a dinosaur skull. Cage ultimately won, although a few years later he returned it after investigators determined it had been illegally acquired.
Apex was the crown jewel of Sotheby’s Natural History auction, which featured items including fossils, meteorites and Palaeolithic tools, and was visited by thousands of people.
The auction house documented the process of discovering, preparing and mounting Apex with commercial palaeontologist Jason Cooper, who unearthed the fossil at his property in Moffat County, Colorado, two years ago. The region was the richest wellspring of dinosaur fossils in the US, Sotheby’s said, because of its location in a sequence of Upper Jurassic sedimentary rock.
Cooper has discovered multiple other dinosaur specimens in the US.
Other items auctioned off in the same sale include a set of Neanderthal tools at $22,800 and a lunar meteorite at $40,800, more than four times its high estimate. Seven bidders went after Apex during the live auction at Sotheby’s, according to the auction house.
“‘Apex’ lived up to its name today, inspiring bidders globally to become the most valuable fossil ever sold at auction,” Cassandra Hatton, Sotheby’s global head of science and popular culture, said in a statement.
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