This Stegosaurus (Skeleton) Is for Sale

Good morning. It’s Wednesday. Today we’ll meet a stegosaurus that is about to get a new owner. We’ll also get details on Senator Robert Menendez’s conviction on corruption charges.

Credit…Pamela Smith/Associated Press

Every stegosaurus has its day, and this is Apex’s. Consider:

• Apex is immediately recognizable — a “coloring book dinosaur,” an auction-house expert calls it.

• Apex is tall, at 11 feet, and long, 27 feet from nose to tail.

• Male or female? No one knows. But Apex did not lead a sexless life.

Apex, who roamed the Earth 150 million years ago in the Late Jurassic Period, is to be auctioned today at Sotheby’s in New York. Sotheby’s expects Apex to sell for $3 million to $4 million.

That would make Apex the latest in a parade of big-money dinosaurs. A Tyrannosaurus rex skeleton known as Stan sold for nearly $32 million in October 2020, and in 2022, the remains of a Deinonychus antirrhopus, the creature that inspired the Velociraptor in “Jurassic Park,” went for $12.4 million.Later that year, Sotheby’s sold a Gorgosaurus, a T. rex relative from 80 million years ago, for $6.1 million.

Those dinosaurs followed in the tracks of a T. rex skeleton known as Sue that was auctioned for $8.4 million in 1997 to the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago. At the time The New York Times called the price — about $16.3 million in today’s dollars — “staggering.”

Sales of dinosaur fossils have upset paleontologists who resent the commercialization of evolutionary history. Scientists also worry that fossils will be priced out of the reach of institutions, and that in private collections, they would be unavailable for future research.