Sotheby’s doesn’t only sell mostly worthless digital links to overrated artwork. No, the auction specialists also sell dinosaurs. The newest dino on the block is ‘Apex’, an almost complete Stegosaurus fossil that has the distinction of being the largest fossil of its type ever discovered.
The Stegosaurus hasn’t been sitting idle, either. It was unearthed in Colorado on a dig in 2022 and 2023. At 3.3 metres high and about six metres long, it’s larger than ‘Sophie’, the specimen housed at the British Museum. But since it’s privately owned, spending time at auction is a completely normal thing for it to do.
Apex predator
You could own Apex, which comprises 247 bones mounted on a steel armature (and a few 3D-printed elements to complete the picture. All you have to do is turn up to the 17 July Sotheby’s auction in New York with Bruce Wayne’s wallet. You can probably call in, if your private jet is in for a service that day, but you’ve got to register to participate first.
Apex is expected to fetch between $4 million and $6 million when it goes on sale alongside several as-yet unspecified natural history items. It’s not enough to have enough cash to make the man with the hammer smile, either. You’ll also need enough money for the insurance and then there’s shipping, which is on your own dime — or credit card, as it were. If you’ve got R120 million kicking around and a burning desire to own the largest Stegosaurus fossil on the planet (that we know about), you know where to be in July.
If ancient history isn’t your thing, there’s another Sotheby’s event you should watch. 2 July is the so-called Space Exploration auction. What it includes is murky for now, but it will comprise “historic artifacts from the Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo missions”. Sounds… astronomically expensive.