Dinosaur Fossil Fetches A Record $44 Million At Auction

I had no idea what the dinosaur bone market was like, but the recent, record-breaking sale of a fossilized Stegosaurus skeleton shows that it's thriving. 

In fact, it's so on fire right now that it makes me want to go cruise around in the desert and hack away at rocks until a fossil tumbles out (I'm not exactly sure how the process works) like I'm Alan Grant.

According to Cllct, Sotheby's auction house has sold a "virtually complete" skeleton of a Stegosaurus named "Apex" for a wallet-hurting $44,600,000. That annihilated the pre-auction estimates that the piece would sell for somewhere between $4 million and $6 million.

The reason that the Apex sold for so much is that it features a lot of "authentic bones" and that's a big factor in how much a dinosaur skeleton is worth. In this case, 254 out of 319 bone elements are accounted for.

That makes a lot of sense, but I also think it being a Stegosaurus helped. I know like half a dozen dinosaurs, and that's one of them. That means that Stegosaurs are incredibly popular and, therefore, more valuable. 

NEW YORK, UNITED STATES - 2024/07/10: Press preview for 'Apex' The 150-Million-Year-Old Stegosaurus at Sotheby's auction house. (Photo by Lev Radin/Pacific Press/LightRocket via Getty Images)

I'm sure some hipster paleontologists would disagree with this take, but I'm just saying that if someone tried to sell a "virtually complete" Archaeopteryx skeleton, good luck getting eight figures for it because no one knows what the hell it even is.

I knew the name, and even I had to look it up. It's like a bird… thing.

Further bolstering my point, is the fact that the previous record holder sold for $8.36 million at Sotheby's in 1997. That'd be like $16 million today.

And what kind of dinosaur was that? It was a Tyrannosaurus rex skeleton named "Sue."

I don't think you'll hear too many arguments against the T-Rex being the most well-known dinosaur that ever walked the earth.

There's no word on who took home the fossil, but one thing is certain: whoever did just bought themselves one hell of a conversation piece.