A nearly complete skeleton of a Nanotyrannus, a smaller relative of Tyrannosaurus rex that lived alongside it 67 million years ago, sold at Sotheby's in New York this week for $47.3 million, making it the second-most valuable dinosaur ever sold at auction.
The skeleton, nicknamed "Jodi" after Jodi Pierson, who discovered it on her private land in Montana's Hell Creek Formation in 2019, drew six bidders across a twelve-minute phone-and-online bidding war before selling well above Sotheby's initial $6 million to $9 million estimate. Measuring 19.6 feet long and standing 9.6 feet tall on its mounted armature, the skeleton comprises roughly 191 fossil bone elements and is one of only three substantial Nanotyrannus skeletons known to science — and the first to reach the market since the genus was formally confirmed as distinct from juvenile T. rex last fall.
A record sale, and a familiar complaint
"Their passion and expertise have been fundamental to Jodi's story," said Cassandra Hatton, Sotheby's vice-chair and worldwide head of science and natural history, thanking the team that excavated and preserved the skeleton. The buyer has not been publicly identified.
The price reignited a running debate in paleontology over private fossil sales. Thomas R. Holtz Jr., a vertebrate paleontology lecturer at the University of Maryland, said that as a tyrannosaur researcher, his concerns about Jodi's sale mirror his concerns about all multimillion-dollar fossil auctions: museums are closing or facing closure over budget shortfalls a fraction of this sale's price, he said, while "a well-funded museum would be able to gather multiple good skeletons for the price of this one 'trophy.'" He added that significant fossils risk being "lost to research and the public when they are in private hands," unless a buyer eventually donates them to an institution where scientists can study them.
