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Those visiting Christie’s in London this week have been treated to an unusual spectacle. For the first time since it moved to its King Street address in 1824, the auction house’s gallery is not showcasing paintings or sculptures but dinosaurs: three prehistoric skeletons that it estimates are worth up to £13mn.
The skeletons of a stegosaurus and an adult and young allosaurus date back about 150mn years and were excavated and reconstructed by the seller, the Swiss-German company Interprospekt. “It’s so exciting. This was my favourite dinosaur as a kid,” says James Hyslop, Christie’s head of natural history, of the spiked-tail allosaurus pair.
He has reason to be pleased. The rivalry between Sotheby’s and Christie’s over the sale of dinosaurs is as fierce as past battles between the creatures themselves. Sotheby’s drew blood in New York in July by selling a stegosaurus for $44mn to the billionaire financier Ken Griffin, and Christie’s is striking back with this sale.
It is also a notable coup for the London auction market, which has been overshadowed by growth in New York and Asia. Christie’s sales in Europe, including the UK, fell by 6 per cent between 2010 and 2023, and its chief executive Guillaume Cerrutti recently called for London and Paris to co-operate to “keep Europe at the centre”.
Academic paleontologists are less happy, complaining that museums and institutions are no longer able to add to collections. “We cannot stop it, but we think that it is really, really bad for science. When you sell a dinosaur for millions, scientists are priced out,” Stuart Sumida, president of the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology, told me.
Griffin is making efforts to ease these worries by donating millions to scientific institutions and lending out his dinosaur. Apex, the 27-foot long stegosaurus that he acquired in July has just gone on public display at the American Museum of Natural History in New York and will stay there for four years before being replaced with a cast.
So the auction on Thursday will be a theatre of competing interests, including those who regret that it is taking place at all. “We strongly believe that fossils should not have any commercial value,” wrote a group of scientists to Nature journal 15 years ago. But they do, and their value keeps on rising.
Controversy only increases the excitement, which is good for auctions. The point is to attract as many bidders as possible to tussle before the hammer falls. Someone might get a bargain this time since the stegosaurus is being sold with no reserve, just an estimate of £3mn to £5mn (Apex’s estimate was only $4mn to $6mn).
London is this week’s beneficiary. Hyslop says it selected the city over New York partly because it had a slot in its crowded schedule and it is hard to find enough space for dinosaurs: these ones arrived in 12 crates before being rebuilt. The timezone is also convenient for buyers from both Asia and the US.
But most of the financial action is elsewhere. Christie’s auctioned a slice of a rare lunar meteorite in Shanghai in November, and Stan, a tyrannosaurus rex that it sold for $31.8mn to the deep-pocketed Abu Dhabi Department of Culture and Tourism, is due to go on display there next year.
So too is most of the paleontological action. Many of the dinosaurs now being auctioned are from states such as South Dakota and Wyoming because there are enormous stretches of private land on which hunters can operate. Unlike in most countries, anyone who owns the land also has the rights to the fossils beneath it.
Interprospekt owns the Como Bluff site in Wyoming where these ones were excavated and later shipped to Germany. The company was founded by Burkhard Pohl and has one of the world’s largest private collections of fossils. It sells some, has a private museum in Wyoming and has also donated a set to a public museum in Brazil.
Hyslop insists that it is wrong to regard private fossil hunting as simply removing dinosaurs from the public realm. Many would otherwise be in the ground, not in museums. “It is an expensive game to dig a dinosaur out of the ground. It just wouldn’t happen without financial [backing],” he says.
Christie’s would say that, wouldn’t it? But whatever the paleontological ideal, this market has gone global and billionaires lending dinosaurs to museums is better than them being hidden away. These have travelled from Wyoming to London via Germany. Soon, they will be roaming the earth again.
