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A hedge fund billionaire purchased the “finest stegosaurus specimen ever to appear at auction” for a whopping $45 million on Wednesday – a record-setting sum in the world of dinosaur collecting.
Kenneth Griffin, the 55-year-old CEO and founder of Citadel, bought the Jurassic giant — nicknamed Apex — with the intention of keeping the dinosaur inside the United States and possibly loaning it to American institutions.
“Apex was born in America and is going to stay in America,” he said in a statement.
Apex was first discovered by commercial paleontologist Jason Cooper near the aptly named town of Dinosaur, Colorado. Cooper named the specimen Apex because the 11-feet-tall and 20-feet-long dinosaur would’ve been an apex predator when it roamed the earth, 150 million years ago.
Griffin outbid six other prospective dinosaur owners at a Sotheby’s auction – breaking the previous record for the most expensive dinosaur by more than $10 million.
Sotheby’s celebrated the sale as “the first instance of an auction house working to bring a dinosaur specimen to market, starting from the day of its discovery” while some scientists objected to the implications of commercial fossil sales.
“Speaking as a scientist, fossils have no monetary value. You know, these numbers are largely arbitrary. I mean, every fossil literally is unique. And I’m not just saying that, as the starry-eyed scientist,” paleontologist Cary Woodruff told Colorado Public Radio. “I don’t think fossils should be allowed to be auctioned. And these auctions really continue to deepen the divide between what we would consider academic and commercial paleontology.”
Griffin has a history of buying high-profile relics, often with the intention of keeping them within the United States.
In 2021, he outbid several cryptocurrency investors on an early copy of the Constitution, reportedly because he wanted to keep the document inside the country. That edition of the Constitution was subsequently lent to the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, the Wall Street Journal reported.