Stan the T. rex just sold for 27.5 million!

[-Andy-]

Sales just concluded a min ago. I definitely wasn't expecting it to reach this insanely high amount. No word yet AFAIK on whether he's going to a private collection or museum

 

Is this the highest a dinosaur has ever been sold for? I wonder what precedence it'd set for fossils and paleontology moving forward

 

On the pro side, it'd encourage more folks to go out there looking for fossils and possibly finding rare and important finds. On the con, more fossils might be priced out of the reach of museums

[Tidgy's Dad]

Pah! 

Peanuts!

I'll take two, please. 

[connorp]

Wow! That's more than twice what Sue sold for, even after inflation.

[jpc]

This absolutely stinks.   Combined with the Dinosaur Hunters tv show, the dinosaur areas in this state where I collect are going to start crawling with every nutjob wanna-be dinosaur millionaire who thinks he/she can find a T rex.   Landowners are going to be all more reluctant to allow people like me or the museum I work for collect on their land.  Insert cuss word here.  This game changed with the sale of Sue in 1997  and now it is about to change again.  And not for the better.  Insert cuss word here.   This forum is too polite to allow me to use the words I want to use.  

[PrehistoricWonders]

Stan is an insane specimen, but that’s an outrageous amount!

[Dracorex_hogwartsia]

I am extremely shocked to hear this. I had no idea Stan was for sale or would ever be for sale.

[Praefectus]

Stan's sale price is disheartening. It sets a poor precedent for future dinosaur discoveries. While we currently don't know who bought Stan, I highly doubt it was a museum. Similarly, I doubt that he was bought by a fossil hunter/collector/enthusiast. $27.5M is a price that very few can pay. I fear that Stan will spend the rest of his days as a desk ornament. Unappreciated by the masses and unavailable to researchers. 

 

Stan's sale will likely have long-term effects on paleontology. Books will be written and legislature will be passed. My greatest fear is the effect Stan's sale will have on the relationship between private collectors and professional paleontologists. A quick look on social media shows there is increased distrust and demonization occurring on both sides. Perhaps the one ray of hope is that websites like TFF exist where cooperation and communication can happen. 

 

Now truly is the era of commercial paleontology. 

 

[Thecosmilia Trichitoma]

1 hour ago, jpc said:

Combined with the Dinosaur Hunters tv show, the dinosaur areas in this state where I collect are going to start crawling with every nutjob wanna-be dinosaur millionaire who thinks he/she can find a T rex.   Landowners are going to be all more reluctant to allow people like me or the museum I work for collect on their land.

I recently read an article in a fossil magazine called "Fossil News" about the subject. Sadly, I believe that museums wouldn't be able to pay such a high price, and it will gather dust as a lobby curiosity or in a private collection, never to be studied. It is likely that it will also be evidence for the people who believe that no amateur fossil hunting or collecting should be allowed at all. Both outcomes are bad. 

[Raptor9468]

This might encourage countries to pass laws to ban fossil hunting and would affect everyone because of somebody buying ridiculously overpriced fossils, while things like the montana dueling dinosaurs might end up more often in collections,seeing as it still hasn't been sold after Stan has.

[Paleostoric]

27.5 million?! That's an insane price for a specimen that rightfully belongs in a museum for study and education to the public. It looks like we will be entering a time of uncertainty in the fossil/paleontology community and can only hope for the best outcome. At least Sue ended up in the Field Museum, but Stan appears to have met a more grim fate. 

 

Where's Indiana Jones when you need him?

[Compy]

Sad, simply sad. That’s all I can say on this topic. Money rules the world and unfortunately the scientific community and the museums are constantly lacking money...

Our only chance is that Stan was bought by someone who might donate it to a museum or at least allows it to be on display in a museum...

[Kikokuryu]

33 minutes ago, Raptor9468 said:

This might encourage countries to pass laws to ban fossil hunting and would affect everyone because of somebody buying ridiculously overpriced fossils, while things like the montana dueling dinosaurs might end up more often in collections,seeing as it still havent been sold after Stan is

Generally, it seems the most notable fossil bans already in place appear to be linked heavily with cultural heritage laws in general causing a blanket ban. This will extend and bleed into other niches such as coins, war memorabilia, art, etc. The "exported before the ban" aspect makes things messy as well, especially countries that have already exported tons of fossils.

 

If vague half-measures are put in place, worse case scenario, it could potentially incentivize unscrupulous hunters to smash open scientifically valuable jaws to extract less valuable individual teeth. Anything that can't be smashed apart and sold separately will likely be intentionally ignored and left to decay to avoid any confrontation. The last thing anyone wants is to create a thriving black market.

 

What could happen with a more likely chance however is that auctions, social media sites, and search engine advertisements could be pressured into banning fossils and any mention of selling fossils effectively constricting the flow of fossils outside of brick and mortar or specific online stores. This already happens to an extent with most live animals, ivory, certain war memorabilia, suggestive material, etc. Private companies already have the legal right to disallow the sales of certain products. Fossils could be the next one on that list if vocal activists show enough outrage over this matter.

 

Fossils are also in a weird spot since they often overlap with mineral. Depending on how a country views mineral rights, if unique laws are made for fossils belong to the government, it opens up a whole can of worms to other implications, i.e., should precious gems, oil, and raw ore also fall under the same category and can be confiscated from private land. If anything found on the land belongs to the government, should the very concept of owing private land be put into question.

Amusingly, the U.S. will likely not react in anyway on a federal level, which is funny in a way since it's always the famous American dino species that are causing all the problems. The extinct fauna of these other countries that have already blanket banned fossils will never even fetch such ridiculous prices.

[DPS Ammonite]

I am not surprised that Stan sold for so much. When you consider the rarity and the amount of time spent prepping, Stan seems cheap when you compare him to prices paid for paintings. If you have 100 million plus dollars and like fossils, there are very few million dollar fossils available for sale. The best fossils are now becoming commodities and investments for the ultra wealthy. Demand is outstripping supply.
 

Here is a list of 89 paintings that sold for (adjusted for inflation) 70 million dollars plus:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most_expensive_paintings

 

By my calculations just one Elvis by Worhol is worth about the same as Stan. What would you rather have? Triple Elvis is about 90 million dollars divided by three equals 30 million dollars for each Elvis.
 

We can only hope that some of the great but expensive fossils in private hands will be donated to museums for all to see and for scientists to study. 

 

 

[FranzBernhard]

2 hours ago, DPS Ammonite said:

The best fossils are now becoming commodities and investments for the ultra wealthy.

This is also true for mineral/crystal specimens. But these top-notch mineral specimens are usually scientifically not very important. They are cultural heritage of some kind, of course.

The same holds also true for top-notch fossils, but there is much more to them than cultural heritage "alone" - incredible scientific value! Nobody knows what can be learned from them in 100 or 1000 years from now.
Franz Bernhard

[Troodon]

8 hours ago, jpc said:

This absolutely stinks.   Combined with the Dinosaur Hunters tv show, the dinosaur areas in this state where I collect are going to start crawling with every nutjob wanna-be dinosaur millionaire who thinks he/she can find a T rex.   Landowners are going to be all more reluctant to allow people like me or the museum I work for collect on their land.  Insert cuss word here.  This game changed with the sale of Sue in 1997  and now it is about to change again.  And not for the better.  Insert cuss word here.   This forum is too polite to allow me to use the words I want to use.  

I completely agree.  Sad day.

On my recent visit to the BHI spoke with Pete about the sale and although he did not own it any more he just wanted it to be purchased by a museum.  At that price hard to believe it happened 

 

[Miocene_Mason]

1 hour ago, Troodon said:

I completely agree.  Sad day.

On my recent visit to the BHI spoke with Pete about the sale and although he did not own it any more he just wanted it to be purchased by a museum.  At that price hard to believe it happened 

 

I hope they didn’t, think about how much research they could get done or how many staff they could hire with that kind of cash. 

[Troodon]

6 minutes ago, WhodamanHD said:

I hope they didn’t, think about how much research they could get done or how many staff they could hire with that kind of cash. 

The BHI did not own Stan at the time of the sale

[Kikokuryu]

3 hours ago, DPS Ammonite said:

I am not surprised that Stan sold for so much. When you consider the rarity and the amount of time spent prepping, Stan seems cheap when you compare him to prices paid for paintings. If you have 100 million plus dollars and like fossils, there are very few million dollar fossils available for sale. The best fossils are now becoming commodities and investments for the ultra wealthy. Demand is outstripping supply.

Maybe, but fossils in general do seem to have a much lower ceiling than other antiquities. It's a bit of a weird situation, Tyrannosaurus rex is an outlier and is the species that keeps causing the uproar. Most other dinosaurs and Mesozoic creatures, especially the obscure ones seem to cap out fairly quick to where institutions would stand a fighting chance. A mangled and crushed up corpse of an obscure or indeterminate dinosaur is also unlikely to be appealing to billionaires, but I could be wrong.

 

That said, if this keeps going on, what's going to suck is when all that frustration gets pointed somewhere, and some unfortunate low budget collector gets the brunt of the attacks.

 

On a side note, I wish the enthusiasm for finding dinosaurs wasn't exclusive to T-rex; there's more to American dinosaurs than just T-rex. If other countries start hard banning fossils because of T-rex, it would be really unfortunate because these people aren't even extensively going after those fossils anyway. I mean, if Tarbosaurus was legal, it would probably be treated as a poor man's rex like JR Tyrannosaurids and Timurlengia. I think Tarbo pieces from "old collections" are still significantly cheaper than rex equivalents whenever they pop up. Even Carc gets sold as an "African T-rex". Every large theropod is compared to and treated like a poor man's rex which is unfortunate . . . except for Abelisaurs, they're all secretly raptors in disguise. -rant over-

[Top Trilo]

Why is the t-rex the one that gets all the fame? Its not the largest or the oldest, its not even the largest carnivore. Whoever has $25 million + to spend on a fossil probably has a giant house and will put it in one of the many rooms that will only be admired every once in the while by the one who bought it. If it was in a museum it could be studied and we could learn some things we never knew before and if displayed millions of people could see it whenever they wanted to. It would be like buying it for $0 and sharing it that sounds better than $27 million gone. Then like what JPC said more people will want to look for the T-rex in Wyoming and Montana and then museums like him will get less access. Like what DPS said for the best item in the field 27 million can be lower than others, even baseball cards sell for millions of dollars, paintings sell for 100s of millions of dollars but the one that matters to the scientific community and should matter to everyone has been sold to someone who probably knows nothing about fossils. We can only hope that a museum will find the next T-rex and be even more complete than Stan and not ever be up for sale.

[Troodon]

5 hours ago, Top Trilo said:

Why is the t-rex the one that gets all the fame? Its not the largest or the oldest, its not even the largest carnivore. Whoever has $25 million + to spend on a fossil probably has a giant house and will put it in one of the many rooms that will only be admired every once in the while by the one who bought it. If it was in a museum it could be studied and we could learn some things we never knew before and if displayed millions of people could see it whenever they wanted to. It would be like buying it for $0 and sharing it that sounds better than $27 million gone. Then like what JPC said more people will want to look for the T-rex in Wyoming and Montana and then museums like him will get less access. Like what DPS said for the best item in the field 27 million can be lower than others, even baseball cards sell for millions of dollars, paintings sell for 100s of millions of dollars but the one that matters to the scientific community and should matter to everyone has been sold to someone who probably knows nothing about fossils. We can only hope that a museum will find the next T-rex and be even more complete than Stan and not ever be up for sale.

Its possible that a private individual like the billionaire? collector Burkhard Pohl who started the Wyoming Dinosaur Center purchased it.   But in the end it will affect how ranchers view collectors

[LordTrilobite]

That's an insane amount of money.

[Miocene_Mason]

2 hours ago, Troodon said:

The BHI did not own Stan at the time of the sale

I should clarify: think how much a museum could fund without spending such frivolous amounts on a T. rex

[jpc]

1 hour ago, WhodamanHD said:

I should clarify: think how much a museum could fund without spending such frivolous amounts on a T. rex

We could build a new building for just a touch more... a nice big modern one.  Where we could display our rex for everyone to see. 

[Dracorex_hogwartsia]

9 hours ago, Troodon said:

The BHI did not own Stan at the time of the sale

Do you know when the BHI lost possession of Stan and who the owner was?

[Troodon]

4 hours ago, Dracorex_hogwartsia said:

Do you know when the BHI lost possession of Stan and who the owner was?

Yes its Pete's brother Neal as part of the settlement of a lawsuit.

 

This is today's  press release by Pete Larsen (BHI)

 

STAN Press release 7OCT2020.pdf