Rich People Are Spending a Fortune to Buy Museum Dinosaur Bones
· Vice
Examples of how the world is catering exclusively to the wealthy are everywhere you look. From trips to Disney to new cars, only the wealthy can afford anything anymore. Perhaps the most cartoonish example of the rich snatching up things that should be more accessible but aren’t, only to have them become a showy, trendy investment, is dinosaur bones.
Close to a year ago, I wrote about a study published in Palaeontologia Electronica that warned that dinosaur bones have turned into a status symbol among the rich and powerful, leaving researchers who need them for scientific purposes high and dry, as they have to fight over the few fossils that remain.
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A new report in Fortune indicates that the problem has only gotten worse. The article’s prime example is a 17-foot triceratops named Trey. Trey was a fossil that stood at the entrance of the Wyoming Dinosaur Center, a museum filled with dinosaur fossils that’s been a hit with local kids for just over 20 years.
Trey is now headed to the auction block, where he’ll fetch upwards of $5.5 million now that the market for dinosaur bones has exploded.
Rich People Are Buying Museum Dinosaur Bones Now
Trey, discovered in 1993 in Lusk, Wyoming, is being sold through Joopiter, the auction platform founded by Pharrell Williams, the guy who did that song for the Despicable Me 2 soundtrack. Trey had been sold in a private transaction recently, and it is currently available for viewing in Singapore—but the Triceratops skeleton that once delighted children at a dinosaur museum is now only available for private viewings, and soon will be just the statement piece some rich guy is going to plop in the living room of his third vacation home.
Trey is just one part of a larger dinosaur fossil gold rush. In 2024, “Apex,” a stegosaurus, sold for $44.6 million, breaking the previous record of $31.8 million set by “Stan,” a Tyrannosaurus rex skeleton, in 2020. Even juvenile specimens are blowing past estimates, sometimes multiplying their expected price fivefold. Fossils, once the domain of research institutions, are now competing with Basquiats and blue-chip stocks as the rich have been handed so much money that they seemingly have no idea what to do with it but to snatch up every dinosaur bone they can find out of sheer boredom.
It’s not all bleak. Sometimes, private owners loan the fossils to museums. For instance, Apex the stegosaurus is now on a long-term loan at the American Museum of Natural History. Unfortunately, many of them remain in private collections, viewable by only the elite few.
Auction house executives speaking to Fortune say that fossil buyers want objects with narrative weight, things that feel timeless and cinematic. Objects that tell a story because, in this case, they were once living creatures. But more than that, they are conversation pieces that some drunk rich guy can spill some wine on.
As fossil prices soar, the museums and universities that once housed these creatures so they can be researched by scientists and appreciated by the public are now struggling to compete. As scientifically significant fossils vanish into private collections, so too vanish our chances of learning more about them.
As for Trey, he’s always been privately owned, even when he was at the museum. But whether he ends up back in the museum or in some billionaire’s cigar room will be up to whichever rich person coughs up the most for him when he goes up for auction in mid-March.
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