Shen, the T. rex specimen that Christie’s decided not to auction off this month. It had been valued at up to $25 million.Credit...How Hwee Young/EPA, via Shutterstock
The New York Times has an article about the canceled auction of Shen a Tyrannosaurus rex. Christie's was scheduled to auction the dinosaur in November 2022, but canceled the event when questions emerged about how it had been described. Shen's skeleton consists of 79 original bones, which was described as "54% complete by bone density". This description was questioned by professional paleontologists as misleading. The missing parts of the skeleton are replicas of Stan's fossil bones. Stan is a T. rex that was discovered by the Black Hill Institute back in the 1990's. It sold in a Christie's auction for $31 million back in 2020.
“That’s 145 million years old, plus or minus,” said Larson, a 70-year-old fossil expert and dealer, as he walked through an excavation site that had already yielded seven dinosaurs.
Hulett is fertile ground for the current dinosaur-bone hunting craze, its population of buried dinosaurs very possibly exceeding its human population of 309. Larson has been digging here for more than 20 years, beginning not long after Sue, a Tyrannosaurus rex fossil that he helped excavate, sold at auction for $8.4 million in 1997, ushering in a boom in the market for old bones. A wave of amateur excavators headed for fossil-rich hills, and local landowners started to wonder if they could farm a new crop: dinosaur skeletons.
...
Sue’s record price was beaten by Stan, another T. rex that Larson’s company excavated, which Christie’s sold at auction in 2020 for $31.8 million. This year a Deinonychus (the inspiration for the Velociraptors depicted in the film “Jurassic Park”) sold for $12.4 million, a Gorgosaurus fetched $6.1 million, and Sotheby’s sold a single T. rex tooth for more than $100,000. Next month, a T. rex skull is estimated to fetch between $15 million and $20 million. Buyers include financiers, Hollywood stars, tech industry leaders and a crop of new or developing natural history museum facilities in China and the Middle East.
