A juvenile Ceratosaurus fossil sold for $30.5 million with fees at Sotheby’s, blasting past its high estimate of $6 million.
The top lot of Sotheby’s natural history sale on July 16 prompted a six-minute bidding war between six bidders on the phone, online, and in the room, resulting in the third-highest price for a dinosaur at auction.
The auction result on July 16 follows the sale of 27-foot long skeleton nicknamed ‘Apex’, which sold for $44.6 million at Sotheby’s in July 2024 to Top 200 collector Ken Griffin and is currently on loan to the American Museum of Natural History; and a $32 million Tyrannosaurus rex skeleton that sold at Christie’s in 2020.
A Sotheby’s press release described Lot 11 as “exceptional” and “one of the finest and most complete examples of its genus ever found,” with 139 original fossil bone elements and “a remarkably complete and fully articulated skull.” The carnivorous dinosaur roamed the early Earth approximately 154 million–149 million years ago.
Its fossil was unearthed at the storied Bone Cabin Quarry (West) in Wyoming in 1996, and was formerly exhibited unmounted at the Museum of Ancient Life, nonprofit institution in Utah.
The New York Times reported the museum had removed it from its collection and sold it to Brock Sisson, a former employee who is now a commercial paleontologist, for an undisclosed amount. Sisson’s company mounted the fossil and then brought it to Sotheby’s for auction.
Sotheby’s also sold a Gorgosaurus skeleton in 2022 for $6.1 million and the first-ever dinosaur to be sold at auction, a T. rex nicknamed ‘Sue’, for $8.4 million in 1997, now housed at the Field Museum in Chicago.
Sotheby’s press release stated that the unnamed buyer of the Ceratosaurus intends to loan it to an institution.
The natural history auction at Sotheby’s also featured the largest piece of Mars on earth. After 15 minutes of bidding with auction specialists on the phone and online, the Martian Meteorite – NWA 16788 sold for $5.3 million with fees, on a high estimate of $4 million. The result for the 54-pound scientific specimen instantly set a new world record for the most valuable meteorite ever sold at auction.
The other two lots that sold for seven figures and well above high estimates were dinosaur fossils: a “virtually complete” Skull of a Pachycephalosaurus (estimate of $800,00 – $1.2 million) and an Articulated Tyrannosaurus Rex Foot (estimate of $250,000 to $350,000). Both sold for $1.758 million including fees.
Notably, all four of the top lots in the natural history sale also accepted cryptocurrency payments.
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