Nanotyrannus skeleton goes to auction in New York with £4.5m price tag
The auction of the rare skeleton comes amid debate in the scientific community about whether dinosaur remains should end up in private hands or public view.
Nanotyrannus skeleton heads to New York auction with £4.5m estimate
A mounted skeleton of a newly identified dinosaur, once thought to be a juvenile Tyrannosaurus rex, is going under the hammer with a minimum price of $6m (£4.5m).
Nicknamed "Jodi", the roughly 10-foot-tall (3m) skeleton will be sold by Sotheby's in New York. The auction follows researchers' confirmation a year ago that the skeleton belongs to a separate genus.
The Late Cretaceous predator is expected to make as much as $9m when it is auctioned later today. The sale comes after Sotheby's sold a Tyrannosaurus rex known as "Gus" for a record $50.1m (£37.4m) in July.
The auction has also reignited debate within parts of the scientific community over whether dinosaur remains should be privately sold.
Sotheby's says "Jodi" is an "excellent exhibition-ready" skeleton with around 191 fossil-bone elements and a "beautifully preserved, virtually complete skull".
The auction house also says the Nanotyrannus is "one of only three such skeletons known to science." According to Sotheby's, this is the first specimen to reach the market since US researchers confirmed the genus last October.
Megan Jenkins, a palaeontologist at the University of Portsmouth, told the BBC's Today programme on Tuesday that Nanotyrannus "was for a very long time believed to be sort of a teenager of T. rex".
"But it's a lot smaller and its a lot more gracile. So it's very sort-of sleek, slender, [with] blade-like teeth for slicing through meat," Jenkins said.
Tyrannosaurus rex and Nanotyrannus lived at the same time during the same geological period about 67 million years ago.
"Jodi" was first shown as a juvenile T. rex at London's Frieze Masters international art fair in October 2023, before the Nanotyrannus genus was classified.
The skeleton was found in Montana in the US by rancher Jodi Pierson on her land in the Hall Creek Formation, a heavily studied geological site. It was later excavated by commercial palaeontologist Clayton Phipps.
Phipps also uncovered the well-known "Dueling Dinosaurs" fossil. That specimen, which shows the remains of a Nanotyrannus and Triceratops apparently fighting, was discovered eight miles (13km) from "Jodi" in 2006.
The "Dueling Dinosaurs" find became central to research by Lindsay Zanno and James Napoli that identified Nanotyrannus as distinct from T. rex. Their paper ended decades of argument over whether the dinosaurs were separate species.
The sale of "Jodi" comes as some scientists caution that auctions may signal a new era in fossil collecting by the ultra-rich.
After the sale of "Gus", researchers told the BBC that such remains ought to be displayed in public places where they can be more widely studied.
Prof Steve Brusatte, a palaeontologist at the University of Edinburgh and consultant on the Jurassic Park films, told BBC World Service's What in the World programme in July that the T. rex auction was "concerning".
"I don't know of any museum or university that can afford a price tag like that," he said. "Imagine if the Mona Lisa was just owned by a super-wealthy person and it wasn't on display and people couldn't see it, couldn't enjoy it."
He said he hoped such a sale would not become a trend, adding that it could harm scientific research and public education.
Commenting on today's auction, Brusatte called it "harrowing" that "Jodi" could vanish from public view.
"We've really just found out that Nanotyrannus is real, and now one of the best skeletons is about to be sold to the highest bidder, and it's harrowing to think it could disappear into the vaults of a collector rather than displayed on a museum where it can wow and inspire kids and families and the public at large," he told the BBC.
But Jenkins told the Today programme on Tuesday that there were two sides to the issue, and that a great deal of time, effort and money had gone into excavating the specimens.
"I don't begrudge the people involved for wanting to sell it for such a large amount of money," she said. "Although its a scary prospect, actually a lot of them have ended up in the public eye... these things without a doubt will end end up in a museum at some point."