T. rex skull fetches $6.1 million at auction, well below estimate

This year, a vertebrae from the tail of a long-necked dinosaur was auctioned for more than $8,000. A single stegosaurus tail spike sold for over $20,000. A tyrannosaurus rex tooth? Over $100,000.

In a booming market for dinosaur fossils, auction house Sotheby’s has estimated that a skull from tyrannosaurus rex that was going to be auctioned would fetch between US$ 15 million and US$ 20 million. But at its sale on Friday, the specimen sold for $6.1 million, including fees, to an anonymous buyer.

The auction raised questions about whether the dinosaur gold rush momentum — which has troubled many academic paleontologists who fear their research will be turned into trophies — was showing signs of waning.

The New York sale comes after the planned auction of a larger specimen of T. rexvalued at $15 million to $25 million, was scrapped by Christie’s in Hong Kong after questions were raised about how much real dinosaur bone was included.

Todd Levin, a veteran art consultant, said the collapse of the Christie’s sale may have injected some uncertainty into the fossil market.

“Everything is built on confidence,” Levin said after the sale on Friday, “and right now there’s very low confidence in that area.”

Earlier this year, dinosaur fossils were a boon to auction houses: Christie’s sold a skeleton of Deinonychus for US$12.4 million, and one of Gorgosaurus sold for $6.1 million at Sotheby’s.

Questions about the specimen T. rex by Christie’s, nicknamed Shen and put up for auction by an anonymous consignor, revolved around what proportion of the skeleton would be a replica of another dinosaur’s bone – a common practice in skeleton assembly.

The bone replicas used in Shen were fashioned from a famous specimen called the Stan, which broke a fossil sales record when it fetched $31.8 million at Christie’s auction two years ago, boosting the industry.

Sotheby’s said the skull sold at Friday’s auction, dubbed Maximus, was complemented by resin casts of another T. rex owned by the anonymous seller, who also prepared the specimen for auction.

Buyers were told by the auction house that the skull “contains 30 bones out of the approximate total of 39 bones” and were given a colored drawing of a skull with the actual bones (From the drawing, a potential buyer would know, for example, that not all the teeth of T. rex were real).

The skull, which weighs more than 200 pounds, was discovered on private land in northwestern South Dakota, an area known to be rich in fossils, the auction house said.

For years, high prices for fossils have irritated academic paleontologists, who fear that scientifically important specimens will disappear from the halls of wealthy collectors. With auction prices rising, experts at museums and universities are increasingly concerned that their institutions will be squeezed out of the market.

Some specimens that were put up for auction didn’t strike scientists as important enough to worry about losing them, but James G. Napoli, a paleontologist and researcher at the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences, said Maximus appeared to have scientific importance.

“It’s something I would love to study in my research if I could,” said Napoli, who studies variation between dinosaur specimens. “We always expect it to be purchased by an institution or an individual who donates it to someone else.”

Auction houses tend to say they also hope the specimens they sell end up in a museum for the public to see and scientists to research — but who makes the winning bid is not in their control.

After more than a year of mystery about where the T. rex Stan would stop, National Geographic reported that the specimen will be housed in a natural history museum that is being created in Abu Dhabi, capital of the United Arab Emirates.

“We can’t ignore the fact that we live in a capitalist society; that’s how our world works,” said Cassandra Hatton, global head of science and popular culture at Sotheby’s, which organized the auction. “Maybe they’ll go private for a while, but I think they’ll end up in museums.”

In a statement after Friday’s auction, Hatton said it can be difficult to assess the value of a specimen when there are few historical parallels.

“Today’s sale was always designed to value the market,” Hatton said, noting that there was no minimum price set by the seller, “and we are pleased to have set a significant new benchmark for dinosaur fossils at auction.”

Sotheby’s played an important role in introducing dinosaur bones as the centerpiece of auctions. In 1997, after a legal battle over the ownership of a skeleton of T. rex named Sue, the auction house sold it to Chicago’s Field Museum for $8.4 million (or $15.4 million adjusted for inflation; R$80.5 million today).

Henry Galiano, a fossil appraiser who was a Sotheby’s consultant to Sue and Maximus, described the recently sold skull as an important research specimen, pointing to evidence of scarring and lesions from possible infection. Small holes in the surface indicate insects may have attacked the carcass before it was buried, he said.

The specimen was mostly eroded away when it was discovered, but in addition to the skull the buyer will receive a part of the scapula and other bone fragments believed to be from the same individual.