A rare skeleton of a roughly 150 million-year-old Ceratosaurus that had been on display for 25 years at a Thanksgiving Point museum sold for more than $30.5 million Wednesday, making it one of the most expensive auctions in history.
The fossilized skeleton was one of just four known Ceratosaurus specimens in the world, according to Sotheby’s, the auction house that conducted the sale, and is the only juvenile.
Thanksgiving Point’s Mountain America Museum of Ancient Life acquired the skeleton in 2000, but sold it for an undisclosed sum last year to a Pleasant Grove company, Fossilogic, formed by Brock Sisson, who had worked at the Lehi museum as a teenager, according to The New York Times. The company finished and mounted the specimen before putting it up for auction.
Thanksgiving Point’s president and CEO, McKay Christensen, told The Salt Lake Tribune last month that the sale of the skeleton was “really necessary for our ongoing sustainability,” and the proceeds will be used to care for and acquire other artifacts.
When the skeleton went on the block, six bidders locked in a back-and-forth battle for it lasting more than six minutes as the price rose and rose — to six times the original estimate before the final bid prevailed.
The auction, announced last month, rankled some in the paleontology community who were concerned about the public and scientists potentially losing access to specimens and the practice of a museum selling off dinosaurs to pay bills.
“The optics are terrible,” Jim Kirkland, Utah’s state paleontologist, said in an interview. “This has created a real stink in the profession. … If it gets buried in a private collection where no one gets to see it, that would be really, really sad.”
By law, dinosaur fossils discovered on public land cannot be sold to private owners, but this Ceratosaurus skeleton was found on private land in 1996 at the Bone Cabin Quarry in Wyoming.
According to Sotheby’s, however, the specimen won’t vanish from public view. The auction house said in a news release that the new owner plans to loan the skeleton to an institution “as is fitting for a specimen of this rarity and importance.”
The skeleton had been valued by Sotheby’s before the sale at between $4 million and $6 million, but the final auction price of more than $30.5 million makes it among the priciest dinosaur fossils ever to be sold at auction. Last year, a stegosaurus skeleton named “Apex” fetched $44.6 million. Before that, a Tyrannosaurus rex skeleton known as “Stan” went for $32 million. Those skeletons are on display in museums in New York City and Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates, respectively.
Sotheby’s did not provide information about who bought the Ceratosaurus skeleton.
Fully grown, the carnivorous late Jurassic dinosaur, which lived between 149 million and 154 million years ago, would have measured more than 20 feet in length, boasted bladelike teeth, along with a ridge of bony material running down its spine, and a distinctive tri-horned head, with one horn on its nose and one above each eye. It was among the species in the movie “Jurassic Park III”.
This juvenile was just over 6 feet tall and 11 feet long with 139 fossilized bone fragments and sculpted material filling in the rest of the lunging skeleton.
