It was the first time that a New York Luxury Week auction had offered a surprise. The best of the best in opulent goods are showcased in this series of sales. The only rare item up for grabs was a skull.
One of the most complete tyrannosaurus rex skulls has been found. It was the first of its kind to be sold at a public auction and it sold for $6,069,500.
Fossil sales have been going up for a while. A T rex skeleton with an estimated price tag of $25 million was withdrawn from an auction. One of the only 20 existing fossils of the gorgosaurus was sold last summer for $6.1 million. There are dinosaur skeletons at the art fair. A 154-million-year-old camptosaurus and a triceratops skull were sold in the UK this year. A 50-million-year-old crocodile was sold at the ArtAncient gallery.
The senior dinosaur specialist at London's Natural History Museum says that dinosaurs have been picked up by people who are more interested in art. Dinosaurs are rare and have a lot of value. It is possible for them to reflect their owner's personality in a way that Rembrandt can't. A collector might relate to the fearsome nature of the T rex.
Fossils are similar to fine wines and coins in that they are investments.
The price tags for dinosaur bones are very high. In 1997 a T rex fossil nicknamed Sue sold in the US for $8.4 million, making it the most expensive T rex fossil in history. There was a new pop-culture interest in dinosaur skeletons at that time. Sue became famous as a result of the legal battle. Dinosaurs have become more common since then. Stan, a rex, sold at Christie's in 2020 for $32 million, breaking Sue's record.
Peter is the president of the Black Hills Institute of Geological Research in South Dakota. He has excavated more T rex skeletons than any other palaeontologist. The institute was the only professional business in the US that was involved in finding and preparing dinosaur bones. A bunch of people came in thinking they would make easy money, but they didn't know how much work goes into finding and preparing fossils.
Fossil traffickers targeted dinosaur bones in countries where prehistoric relics belong to the state, as well as untrained fortune-seekers. Private land fossils can be sold to the highest bidder in the US and UK.
Museums and researchers have begun to be priced out of buying rare specimen, or have missed discoveries because they were traffickers. Most museums don't have the funds to compete on a million dollar price tag. When dinosaurs disappear into private hands, it's problematic. It is not known what will happen to a specimen when it is bored or needs to be thrown away. It is not available for research.
Scientists are protesting over sales. A dinosaur fossil was offered by an auction house. The members of the society wrote an open letter asking for the sale to be stopped before the bones were lost to science. The fossil was sold for over $1m.
Commercial palaeontologists are important for finding research specimen. They found skeletons that would have been lost. The people involved in this trade are worth a lot of money. This is a good living for people in Africa. There is no funding for museums.
The new prices achieved by dinosaur fossils should be approached in a more practical way, according to the thinker. Scientists feel threatened by the auctions because museums don't have enough money to compete. The natural history museums haven't gone to the private sector to raise money to buy them. Natural history museums should be able to do it if art galleries can. You can't just wring your hands and wish it was different.
Dinosaur relics are being recognised for their true worth. When you think about what museums pay for works of art that aren't worth as much as the dinosaur skeletons, they don't have any scientific value and take less work to prepare for show
A dinosaur skeleton is beautiful to look at.
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