Next month, the famed auction house Sotheby’s will put on the block a rare skeleton of a Ceratosaurus, a carnivorous dinosaur that roamed the West roughly 150 million years ago and, until recently, had been on display at the Mountain America Museum of Ancient Life at Thanksgiving Point.
It is, according to Sotheby’s, one of just four known Ceratosaurus skeletons in the world and, aside from one on display at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C., is considered the most complete. It is also the only known juvenile specimen. (The Utah Museum of Natural History has one of the other skeletons in its collection.)
When it goes up for auction on July 17 at Sotheby’s, it is expected to draw between $4 million and $6 million. But Jim Kirkland, Utah’s state paleontologist, expects it could go for five times that amount.
“It’s an impressive, impressive animal,” Kirkland said, “no doubt about it.”
Fully grown, this early meat-eater would have been more than 20 feet in length, blade-like teeth and a ridge of bony material running down its spine and its distinctive horned head. It was among the species in the movie “Jurassic Park III”.
“It would have been, in life, a very gnarly looking dinosaur with three big horns — two above its eyes, one above its nose — and this fringe of stuff down its back like an iguana,” Kirkland said.
Its uniqueness, however, is part of what has alarmed paleontologists in Utah and nationwide by the upcoming auction, fearing that it is fueling a trend of high-dollar dinosaur auctions that transfer the rare specimens into private hands and end up depriving the public and scientists of access to the fossils.
“This has created a real stink in the profession,” said Kirkland. “If it gets buried in a private collection where no one gets to see it, that would be really, really sad.”
McKay Christensen, President and CEO of Thanksgiving Point, said the Ceratosaurus was on display until last year when the board of trustees approved selling it to a private party.
“It was really necessary for our ongoing sustainability,” Christensen said. “If you talk to anyone in the museum industry, sustainability is a concern.”
Proceeds from the sale were set aside to protect the existing collection of fossils and add others — like a Barosaurus, a massive, long-necked dinosaur akin to a Brontosaurus — that the museum has already purchased and will put on display next year.
(Sotheby's via The New York Times) An undated photo provided by Sotheby's shows an X-ray of the specimen’s skull.
According to The New York Times, the buyer was Brock Sisson, who first crossed paths with the Ceratosaurus when he was 16 years old and working at the Thanksgiving Point museum in 1999 — three years after the specimen was discovered at the Bone Cabin Quarry in Wyoming.
Sisson went on to form a commercial paleontology company and purchased the Ceratosaurus last year.
Kirkland, the Utah paleontologist, said he found out about the sale when he sent an intern to ask about studying the fossil and found out it was already gone.
Christensen would not say how much they were paid for the skeleton and Sisson would not disclose the purchase price to The Times.
When the young Ceratosaurus goes up for auction, it will be “among the very finest dinosaur fossils ever to be offered at auction,” Cassandra Hatton, vice chairman of science and natural history at Sotheby’s, said in promotional material for the sale.
“This juvenile Ceratosaurus is a marvel of prehistoric preservation—an extraordinary specimen that bridges scientific rarity with natural beauty,” she said.
A booming bone business
The Sotheby’s auctions of dinosaur fossils have become a draw since it conducted its first in 1997 — the sale of “Sue,” a Tyrannosaurus Rex skeleton that went for $8.2 million to the Field Museum in Chicago with private backing.
Another Tyrannosaurus Rex called “Stan” was auctioned off by Christie’s New York in 2020 for nearly $32 million.
Then, last year, Sotheby’s set a record for the most valuable dinosaur fossil ever sold when it auctioned off “Apex,” an 11-foot-tall, 27-foot-long Stegosaurus skeleton discovered on private property by a commercial collector in Dinosaur, Colorado, for $44.6 million, shattering Sue’s record.
Sue remains in the Chicago museum while Apex was purchased by billionaire Ken Griffin and is on loan to the American Museum of Natural History in New York City. Stan ended up in a museum in Abu Dhabi.
In recent years, Sotheby’s has also auctioned off skeletons of a Gorgosaurus, a Tyrannosaurus skull, a Triceratops skull, and various fossilized teeth and claws.
The sale of Sue poses a best-case scenario, where the skeleton continues to be available for public appreciation and study by paleontologists, said Josh Lively, curator of the Prehistoric Museum in Price, Utah.
But a specimen like this juvenile Ceratosaurus, Lively said, is small enough, standing just over six feet high and about 11 feet long, that it’s easy to envision it being purchased by a private owner for display at home.
“Some dinosaurs are big. Some you can’t fit into a McMansion,” he said, “but this one is small enough you could see some rich person buying this as a centerpiece for their living room or entryway.”
That poses the potential, Lively said, that a dinosaur skeleton that had — up until the Thanksgiving Point museum sold it — been on display for public education and enjoyment, to end up in the hands of private owners, which he said “sets a very, very dangerous precedent” in the museum world.
“In the natural history museum world, [this] has never been discussed and really has been avoided because a big part of how we operate is in the public trust,” he said, “meaning when we take in fossils or archeological artifacts … we are going to exhibit them, they are available for research, they are available for public education and enjoyment.”
With dinosaur fossils fetching more and more at auction, sales could become more and more common, reducing access for the public and scientists. The Museum of Ancient Life, he said, has other valuable specimens, including the only known specimen on earth of a small dinosaur known as Tanycolagreus.
“The optics are terrible,” Kirkland said. Accredited museums, he said, typically won’t sell fossils.
There are six Utah museums accredited by the American Alliance of Museums — the fine arts and natural history museums at the University of Utah, the Utah State University Prehistoric Museum, the Bean Life Science Museum at Brigham Young University, the Hill Aerospace Museum and the Nora Eccles Harrison Museum of Art at USU.
“You can trade it to another facility, but you don’t just unload stuff to make some money to run your facility,” he said. People considering donating artifacts to the museum will see that, he said, and decide they don’t want to give to the museum because it will be sold.
It’s legal if the find was from private land, Kirkland said, but “it taints the name of our few true research museums.”
Christensen, the Thanksgiving Point CEO, said he is aware of the criticism over the sale of the Ceratosaurus.
“I totally understand and, honestly, agree with where they’re coming from. And I agree with the safeguarding that the museum community puts in place to make sure that collections from public land doesn’t happen,” he said. “I understand why they wouldn’t like a private sale like the one we did, but we had our reasons for doing it. We carefully did due diligence, we follow good processes and made sure it was done the right way.”
Hatton, from Sotheby’s, said in a statement that, while the Museum of Ancient Life has been a safe home for the Ceratosaurus for more than 20 years, “it is not a public repository, and so the specimen has sadly never been fully described or studied.”
She points to the new homes of Sue and Apex as examples of bones that ended up in a public setting and said the auction house’s buyers — institutional and private — appreciate and respect the specimens.
“In many cases, it is funding from the private sector that supports museums to allow them to do research, educational programs and public programming to further share these specimens with the public,” she said.
Lively said it’s unlikely anything will stop the auction. “Realistically, cat’s out of the bag,” he said.
All professional paleontologists can do now, he said, is try to discourage museums from selling specimens in the future and convince the network of paleontologists not to work with museums that sell off fossils in the future.
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