This article is taken from the June 2026 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Find our subscription offers here.
When a 67-million-year-old Tyrannosaurus rex goes under the hammer in New York in July, experts are expecting a meteoric price. Estimated at between $20 to 30 million, “Gus” is one of the “greatest examples ever found” and the estimate — the highest ever placed on a dinosaur — is likely to prove conservative.
The fossil market has soared in recent years. In 2020 a T-rex called Stan fetched $31.8 million at a Christie’s auction. Bought by the Abu Dhabi department of culture and tourism, after 70 million years in the cliffs of South Dakota, Stan relocated to Abu Dhabi’s Natural History Museum. Four years later, a stegosaurus called Apex set the record after hedge fund multi-billionaire Ken Griffin bought the virtually complete fossil for $44.6 million at Sotheby’s. “Apex was born in America and is going to stay in America!” Griffin said after the sale.
Gus’s sale represented a pivotal moment for Sotheby’s. It has been a hard few years for the art market, with sellers consequently hesitant to put works up for sale. For auction houses trying to find a way of appealing to a new generation of freshly minted AI billionaires, dinosaurs present a relatable gateway, alongside so-called “collectibles” like Jane Birkin’s original Hermès Birkin or National Basketball Association game-worn jerseys.
London’s best-known dealer in dinosaurs and other fossils is David Salomon, a director at the Mayfair-based gallery David Aaron. He says that fossils correspond to the regular art market in that price is determined by the same metrics of quality, rarity, market comparability and provenance. But as dinosaurs are only starting to be described as an “art asset class”, the market does not apply a steep enough premium to the best specimens.
Salomon has a point. $31.8 million pales in comparison to sales of works by artists such as Jeff Koons whose sculptures regularly fetch much more. “As dealers, we invest in sites,” Salomon says. To obtain the best specimens he encourages fossil collectors — who tend to be younger and from tech and science backgrounds — to buy before the relics are even out of the ground: “The collector will then need to wait anywhere between a few months to a few years depending on the specimen for it to be fully excavated, scientifically assembled and mounted.”
Purchasing a fossil when it’s still in the ground and waiting years to see the finished article is a risky business. “It’s a very hot market right now. But antiquities are a hot and messy topic. There are loads of composite dinosaurs and a black market full of illegal fossils,” says Thomas Woodham-Smith, who runs the Treasure House fair in London.
Woodham-Smith says some dealers are taking advantage of the lack of regulation and surging demand. In 2022 Christie’s withdrew Shen, a T-rex skeleton, from auction in Hong Kong just days before the sale after experts sounded the alarm. They said that the skeleton largely consisted of replica bones from another dinosaur. Christie’s subsequently said that the unidentified seller will instead loan Shen to museums. Shen would have been the first T-rex skeleton to be auctioned in Asia.
In such an unregulated market, counterfeit bones and randomly assembled skeletons are par for the course. “You have dealers who are desperate to sell their fossils at the highest price they can who will tell you that they have 70 or 80 per cent of a dinosaur skeleton, but on closer inspection most of it will be plastic,” said one collector who wished to remain anonymous. It’s common for skeletons to have some counterfeit bones — Gus is approximately 63 per cent complete by bone count whilst Peter Larson of the Black Hills Institute of Geological Research that excavated Stan, calculated that Shen was 95 per cent or more constructed from replica parts from Stan.
When Abu Dhabi snapped up Stan they bought the bones only, with Larson’s institute keeping the intellectual property rights. Practically, this means that they own the rights to all merchandising and can produce replicas of Stan. Which they do, and charge $120,000 each.
T-rexes are specific to North America, and of the 130 that have been found, the majority come from the Hell Creek Formation in the Midwest. The fact that these dinosaurs, which are the holy grail for collectors, even reach the open market is because the United States is unlike almost every other country. If a dinosaur fossil is found anywhere else, it is owned by the government. But in the US a fossil found on private land is private property.
Predictably, this has drawn criticism from scientists and academics. “We are losing the data. They are the information. They are our only means of knowing about the true history of these animals. And when they are just sold off to become someone’s objet d’art in their home it really hurts science in a measurable way,” argues Thomas Carr, a professor at the Carthage Institute of Paleontology. He says the market should be shut down immediately.
Other countries have cracked down on the illegal exports of fossils. In 2012, agents from the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) arrested a Florida businessman who was illegally importing and selling numerous dinosaur fossils that had been smuggled from Mongolia.
Eric Prokopi was caught after he sold a smaller cousin of the T-rex, the Tarbosaurus bataar, at auction in New York for $1 million. He said the dinosaur, which was excavated in Mongolia’s Gobi desert, was from Great Britain. The Mongolian government declared an interest in the skeleton and used a restraining order to prevent it being handed to the buyer. The move prompted a series of privately owned items being returned to Mongolia, much to the devastation of collectors.
“Fossils and fine art both sit at the intersection of rarity, history and cultural narrative. They are objects that carry extraordinary temporal weight and that exist in extremely limited supply,” points out Cole Tunkl, a young Los Angeles-based art advisor whose expertise in contemporary art made him initially reticent to get involved in the dinosaur market. But ultimately, “What became clear was that, at the very highest level, collectors are often driven by the same underlying forces across categories.”
Yet the historical value of the fossils was at times at odds with the buyer profiles. Tunkl and his business partner Sophia de Laney even received requests from eccentric tech founders who wanted to buy the skeletons and spray paint them to form part of the home decor in their Miami mansions. The skeletons can also earn a living, for they can be toured commercially and leased out to museums, netting revenues of $10 million annually. Intellectual property rights means that the specimens can be mechanised and replicated. They are also tax deductible.
Chaw Wei Yang is a 26-year-old dinosaur enthusiast and collector from Singapore. “Art is very subjective,” he states. “A lot of art in the galleries most people don’t know about. Not a lot of people know about the artists. But everyone is brought up with dinosaurs, they have a universal appeal compared to the subjectivity of art.”
Wei says that collectors put up funding for excavations and work with museums and scientists to ensure the information the fossils provide about the creatures that lived tens of millions of years ago is not lost. “People say dinosaurs belong in museums, but museums have a symbiotic relationship with these collectors.”
David Salomon, for example, says he prioritises selling fossils to museums — especially when they are of great scientific interest. A good example of this kind of relationship is the Enigmacursor mollyborthwickae — a dog-sized dinosaur which lived 150 million years ago, which he sold to the Natural History Museum in London where it is now on display. Salomon says the curators were excited by the specimen because they believed it was a new species. “We agreed to place the specimen on unconditional reserve for the museum and invest our efforts into finding a private buyer strictly on the condition they would permanently donate it to the Natural History Museum.” (The dinosaur’s name references a benefactor of the museum whose donation made the purchase possible.)
Despite record auction prices and high demand, it’s important to remember these fossils are the remains of animals that roamed the earth hundreds of millions of years ago. What will life look like millions of years from now?
But for the present, for Chaw Wei Yang, Gus’s impending auction at Sotheby’s is an exciting moment. “Culture belongs to the people but capitalism makes things move,” he says.
