It may not be Matisse or Warhol, but this multi-million dollar sale at Christie’s comes from a different kind of artist: Mother Nature.
Late Thursday, Christie’s sold the skeleton of a Deinonychus antirrhopus — a species that became one of the world’s most recognizable dinosaurs after the release of the movie “Jurassic Park” — for $12.4 million, with fees, to an undisclosed buyer. . The auction continues the trend of expensive fossil sales, a pattern that annoys some paleontologists, who fear specimens could be lost to science if purchased by private individuals rather than public institutions.
The auction house said the fossil, nicknamed Hector, was the first public sale of a Deinonychus, an agile, bipedal dinosaur known for the menacing claws on its legs. The sale price was more than double the auction house’s estimated $6 million cap.
The species most likely wouldn’t get as much attention if it weren’t for ‘Jurassic Park’. In the 1993 novel and film, the beasts called velociraptors actually look more like a Deinonychus (the novel’s author, Michael Crichton, once admitted that “velociraptor” just sounded more dramatic).
This skeletal specimen contains 126 real bones, but the rest have been reconstructed, including most of the skull, the auction house said. The specimen, which dates back about 110 million years, to the Early Cretaceous Period, was unearthed about a decade ago on private land in Montana by Jack and Roberta Owen, self-taught paleontologists, according to Jared Hudson, a commercial paleontologist who researched the specimen. It was later bought by its most recent owner, who remains anonymous.
“I had no idea it was going to end at Christie’s,” Jack Owen, 69, said in an interview this week. He said he was trained in archeology and had worked as a ranch manager and fencing contractor.
Owen had struck a deal with the landowner at the ranch where he worked that allowed him to dig for fossils and split the profits, he said. He first saw some bone fragments in an area where he had already found two other animals. Using, among other things, a scalpel and a toothbrush, he and Roberta, his wife, carefully collected the specimen, with a little help.
To see it go for millions of dollars is astonishing, he said — the profit he received was nowhere near. But Owen said his fossil hunt was not driven by money.
“It’s about the hunt; it’s about the find,” he said. “You are the only human in the world who has touched that animal, and that is priceless.”
The fossils of the species were discovered in 1964 by paleontologist John H. Ostrom, and he named them Deinonychus, meaning terrible claw, after the sharply curved hunting claw that he believed the dinosaur chopped off its prey. Ostrom’s discovery was fundamental to the way scientists understand some dinosaurs today — less lizard-like and more bird-like; fast moving and possibly warm-blooded, and even feathered.
That scientific development is one reason academic paleontologists might be interested in studying specimens like Hector.
Some paleontologists have long protested the auctioning of these fossils, fearing the specimens could be sold at prices beyond the reach of museums.
The issue came to prominence with the sale of Sue, the T. rex skeleton, to the Field Museum for $8.36 million — nearly $15 million in today’s dollars — in 1997. And it has recently come under renewed scrutiny. , after a T. rex skeleton nicknamed Stan brought in a record $31.8 million, nearly quadrupling the estimated $8 million maximum.
Before Christie’s Stan went up for auction in 2020, the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology urged her to consider limiting sales to “bidders from institutions committed to collecting specimens for the common good and forever, or those who bidding on behalf of such institutions.”
“As an organization, we decided we felt that vertebrate fossils belong in museums,” said Jessica M. Theodor, the association’s president, in an interview. “If it’s in private hands, that person dies, their estate sells the copy, and the information is lost.”
Many commercial paleontologists — like Hudson, who bought Hector from the Owens — say their work is also critical to science, and they should be paid for their work so they can continue to do it.
“If people like us weren’t on the ground,” Hudson said, “the dinosaurs would erode and be cut off from science completely.”