{"id":5471,"date":"2024-07-18T15:03:08","date_gmt":"2024-07-18T15:03:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/dailywashingtoninsider.com\/index.php\/2024\/07\/18\/nearly-complete-dinosaur-fossil-sells-for-record-34m\/"},"modified":"2024-07-18T15:03:08","modified_gmt":"2024-07-18T15:03:08","slug":"nearly-complete-dinosaur-fossil-sells-for-record-34m","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dailywashingtoninsider.com\/index.php\/2024\/07\/18\/nearly-complete-dinosaur-fossil-sells-for-record-34m\/","title":{"rendered":"Nearly complete dinosaur fossil sells for record \u00a334m"},"content":{"rendered":"<div>\n<p>A nearly complete fossil of a stegosaurus has sold for a record $44.6m (\u00a334.2m), becoming the most valuable fossil ever sold at auction.<\/p>\n<p>An anonymous US buyer outbid six others for the set of bones, dubbed Apex, at Sotheby&#8217;s in <strong>New York<\/strong> on Wednesday.<\/p>\n<div class=\"sdc-site-outbrain sdc-site-outbrain--AR_6\" aria-hidden=\"true\" data-component-name=\"sdc-site-outbrain\" data-target=\"\" data-widget-mapping=\"\" data-installation-keys=\"\">    <\/div>\n<p>They paid an apex price, beating the previous auction record of $31.8m (\u00a324.4m) spent on a Tyrannosaurus rex nicknamed Stan in 2020 and smashed the pre-sale estimate of $4m-6m (\u00a33m-\u00a34.6m).<\/p>\n<p>Apex stands 3.3 metres (11 feet) tall and 8.2 metres (27 feet) in length, putting it among the most complete fossils ever found.<\/p>\n<p>The dinosaur had lived long enough to show signs of arthritis, the auction house said.<\/p>\n<div class=\"ad ad--teads\">        <\/div>\n<p>Cassandra Hatton, who heads Sotheby&#8217;s science-related business, said Apex &#8220;has now taken its place in history, some 150 million years since it roamed the planet&#8221;.<\/p>\n<p>Apex, she said, is like &#8220;a colouring book <strong>dinosaur<\/strong>&#8220;, for its well-preserved features.<\/p>\n<p>The buyer is American and intends to look into loaning Apex to an institution in the US.<\/p>\n<p>The palaeontology community has mixed feelings about dinosaur fossil sales, as some believe the specimens belong in museums or research centres that cannot afford huge auction prices.<\/p>\n<p>A commercial palaeontologist named Jason Cooper discovered the fossil in 2022 on his property near, perhaps unsurprisingly, the town of Dinosaur, Colorado, a tiny community near Dinosaur National Monument and the Utah border.<\/p>\n<p>The first dinosaur to be sold at auction was a T. Rex named Sue, who went for $8.2m (\u00a36.3m) in 1997.<\/p>\n<p>It is the first time an auction house has been involved with a specimen of this kind throughout the whole process, from discovery to sale, Sotheby&#8217;s said on its website.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n<div>This post appeared first on sky.com<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<p><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>A nearly complete fossil of a stegosaurus has sold for a record $44.6m (\u00a334.2m), becoming&hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":5472,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[24],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5471","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-science"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailywashingtoninsider.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5471","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailywashingtoninsider.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailywashingtoninsider.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailywashingtoninsider.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailywashingtoninsider.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5471"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dailywashingtoninsider.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5471\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailywashingtoninsider.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/5472"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailywashingtoninsider.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5471"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailywashingtoninsider.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5471"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailywashingtoninsider.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5471"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}