A near-record sale in New York
A mounted skeleton of Nanotyrannus, a dinosaur long confused with a young Tyrannosaurus rex, sold at Sotheby's in New York on Tuesday for $47.3m (£35.5m), according to the BBC. The specimen, nicknamed Jodi, stands roughly 10-foot-tall (3m). The auction house had expected it to bring in at least $9m.
The BBC reported that six interested parties competed over 12 minutes of bidding. The buyer has not been identified. The result makes Jodi the second-most valuable dinosaur fossil ever sold. Only Gus, a Tyrannosaurus rex that Sotheby's sold in July for a record $50.1m, fetched more. A Stegosaurus named Apex, sold by the same house in July 2024 for $44.6m, now ranks third.
Sotheby's called the skeleton an "excellent exhibition-ready" specimen with about 191 fossil-bone elements and a "beautifully preserved, virtually complete skull". It also said the Nanotyrannus is "one of only three such skeletons known to science".
From supposed juvenile T. rex to its own genus
Jodi was first shown publicly as a juvenile T. rex at the Frieze Masters international art fair in London in October 2023, before the Nanotyrannus genus had been formally classified. US researchers confirmed last October that the genus exists, and Sotheby's said Jodi is the first specimen to reach the market since then.
Megan Jacobs, a palaeontologist at the University of Portsmouth, told BBC Radio 4's Today programme that Nanotyrannus "was for a very long time believed to be sort of a teenager of T. rex". She described it as smaller and more gracile, with a sleek, slender build and blade-like teeth suited to slicing meat. Both animals lived in the same period roughly 67 million years ago.
The research that separated the two was published by Lindsay Zanno and James Napoli. It relied heavily on the "Dueling Dinosaurs" fossil, which appears to show a Nanotyrannus and a Triceratops locked in combat. Their paper ended decades of argument over whether the animals were distinct.
Where Jodi was found
Rancher Jodi Pierson found the skeleton on her land in Montana, in the Hell Creek Formation, a heavily studied geological site. Commercial palaeontologist Clayton Phipps later excavated it. Phipps had also found the "Dueling Dinosaurs" specimen, which turned up in 2006 about eight miles (13km) from where Jodi was located.
A divided scientific community
The sale has renewed an argument over whether dinosaur remains belong in private hands or in public institutions. Some scientists warn that high-priced auctions could usher in a new era of fossil collecting by the ultra-rich. Researchers told the BBC after Gus was sold that such remains should be displayed publicly, where they can be studied more freely.
Prof Steve Brusatte of the University of Edinburgh, a consultant on the Jurassic Park films, called the July sale of Gus "concerning". "I don't know of any museum or university that can afford a price tag like that," he said. He compared the situation to the Mona Lisa being owned by a super-wealthy person and kept off display. Reacting to Jodi's sale, he told the BBC it was "harrowing" that the skeleton could disappear into a collector's vault rather than wow and inspire families in a museum.
Jacobs offered a different view, saying there are two sides to the debate and that excavating specimens takes a lot of time, effort and money. "I don't begrudge the people involved for wanting to sell it for such a large amount of money," she said. She added that a lot of such specimens have ended up in the public eye and predicted they would reach a museum at some point.
