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Dinosaur Skeleton Sold at Christie’s for $12.4M


It may not be a Matisse or Warhol, but this multimillion-dollar sale at Christie’s comes from a different artist: Mother Nature.

Late on Thursday, Christie’s sold the skeleton of Deinonychus antirrhopus, a species that became one of the world’s best-known dinosaurs after the release of the movie “Jurassic Park,” to an undisclosed buyer for $12.4 million, along with fees. The auction continues the trend of high-priced fossil sales that has plagued some paleontologists, who fear that specimens may be lost to science if purchased by private individuals rather than public institutions.

Nicknamed Hector, the fossil is the first public sale of Deinonychus, an agile, bipedal dinosaur known for its menacing claws, the auction house said. on their feet. The selling price was more than double the auction house’s estimated high of $6 million.

If it wasn’t for “Jurassic Park,” the species probably wouldn’t have garnered as much attention. In the novel and in the 1993 movie, the monsters called velociraptors actually look more like Deinonychus (the novel’s author, Michael Crichton, once admitted to being a “velociraptor” sounded more dramatic).

The auction house said this skeleton specimen contains 126 real bones, but the rest, including most of the skull, has been reconstructed. Dating to the Early Cretaceous period, about 110 million years ago, the specimen was excavated from private land in Montana about a decade ago by self-taught paleontologists Jack and Roberta Owen. sample. It was later bought by its last owner, who remained unnamed.

“I had no idea it was going to end up at Christie’s,” 69-year-old Jack Owen said in an interview this week. He said he studied archeology and worked as a farm manager and fencing contractor.

Owen said he made a deal with the landowner on the farm where he worked, allowing him to dig up the fossils and split the profits. First, he saw some bone fragments in an area where he found two more animals. Using a scalpel and toothbrush, among other tools, he and his wife, Roberta, carefully collected the sample with a little help.

It’s stunning to see it going into the millions of dollars, he said – his profits were nowhere near. But Owen said that fossil hunting is not done for money.

“It’s about hunting; It’s about finding it,” he said. “You’re the only person in the world to touch that animal, and it’s priceless.”

Fossils of the species were discovered in 1964 by paleontologist John H. Ostrom, and he named them Deinonychus, meaning dreadful claw, after the dinosaur’s sharply curved prey claw, which he believes slashed its prey. Ostrom’s discovery laid the foundation for the way scientists understand some dinosaurs today—less lizards and more like birds; fast-moving and possibly warm-blooded or even furry.

This scientific advance is one reason why academic paleontologists are interested in studying specimens like Hector.

Some paleontologists have long opposed the practice of putting these fossils up for auction, fearing that the specimens could be sold at prices beyond the reach of museums.

The issue came up with the sale. To sueThe T. rex skeleton was taken to the Field Museum in 1997 for $8.36 million—about $15 million in today’s dollars. Stan brought in a record $31.8 millionnearly quadruple its estimated high of $8 million.

Before Christie puts Stan up for auction in 2020, the Society for Vertebrate Paleontology forced consider limiting sales to “bidders from or on behalf of institutions committed to curating specimens in the public interest and on a permanent basis”.

“As an organization, we’ve decided that we think vertebrate fossils belong in museums,” the association president Jessica M. Theodor said in an interview. “If it’s in private hands, that person dies, the property sells the sample, and the information is lost.”

Many commercial paleontologists, such as Hudson, who bought Hector from Owens, say their work is also critical to science and that they must be paid for their work so they can continue to work.

“If humans like us weren’t on the ground,” Hudson said, “the dinosaurs would have eroded away and been completely cut off from science.”



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