The 10 most expensive dinosaur fossils ever auctioned

Dinosaur skeletons are an odd category for an auction house. They are enormous, they take months to prepare, they cannot be authenticated the way a painting can, and every sale draws a round of public criticism from palaeontologists who would rather see the specimen in a museum than in a hedge fund manager's atrium. They also sell for more than almost anything else in a natural history saleroom, and the estimates are wrong more often than they are right.

Each figure is the price reported at the time of the sale, with the house, place and date, including the buyer's premium; where hammer and total differ, both are given. Everything is ranked in US dollars so the figures can be compared, with the saleroom currency in brackets.

1. "Gus", a Tyrannosaurus rex — $50.1 million

Sold by Sotheby's in New York on 14 July 2026 and the most expensive fossil ever auctioned. Gus is about 67 million years old, roughly 38 feet long and 12 and a half feet tall, and was dug out of a South Dakota ranch in 2021. He is named after Gary Licking, the rancher who owned the land. Sotheby's put him at 61 per cent complete by bone count and around 75 to 80 per cent by mass, which makes him one of the most complete T. rex specimens known. The estimate was twenty to thirty million dollars. Seven bidders spent about ten minutes getting past it.

2. "Apex", a Stegosaurus — $44.6 million

Sotheby's, New York, 17 July 2024. Found in 2022 by the commercial palaeontologist Jason Cooper on his own land near Dinosaur, Colorado, and about 11 feet tall and 27 feet long. The estimate was 4.9 to 7.4 million dollars. Seven bidders fought over it for more than fifteen minutes and it closed at six times the top estimate. Apex held the record for two years.

3. "Stan", a Tyrannosaurus rex — $31.8 million

Christie's, New York, 6 October 2020. Thirteen feet high, forty feet long, 188 bones, named for Stan Sacrison, the amateur palaeontologist who found the first of them in 1987. The sale angered palaeontologists, who expected Stan to vanish into a private collection. He did not: the buyer turned out to be the Abu Dhabi Department of Culture and Tourism, and Stan is now on display in the Natural History Museum Abu Dhabi.

4. A juvenile Ceratosaurus nasicornis — $30.5 million

Sotheby's, New York, 16 July 2025. Around 150 million years old, about six feet three inches tall and ten feet eight inches long, made up of 139 bone elements including a nearly complete skull. It is the only juvenile of the four known Ceratosaurus specimens. The estimate was four to six million dollars; six bidders took about six minutes to reach thirty.

5. "Hector", a Deinonychus antirrhopus — $12,412,500

Christie's, New York, 12 May 2022. The most complete Deinonychus ever found, from an animal that lived between about 115 and 108 million years ago, and the first of its species ever offered at public auction. It is best known indirectly: the raptors in Jurassic Park were Deinonychus in everything but name. The result was roughly double the top estimate.

6. "Sue", a Tyrannosaurus rex — $8.36 million

Sotheby's, New York, 4 October 1997, and the sale that created this market. Sue took nine minutes and is still the largest and most complete T. rex ever found. The winning bidder was the Field Museum in Chicago, backed by McDonald's, Walt Disney World and private donors, and Sue has been on public display there ever since. Every fossil sale for the next quarter century was measured against this one.

7. "Big John", a Triceratops — $7.7 million (€6,650,000)

Sold at the Hôtel Drouot in Paris on 21 October 2021. The hammer fell at €5.5 million against an estimate of €1.2 to €1.5 million, with fees taking the total to about €6.65 million. Big John is the largest Triceratops skeleton known and is roughly 66 million years old.

8. "Vulcain", an Apatosaurus — $6.4 million (€6,000,000)

Sold in Paris by the auctioneers Barbarossa in November 2024, with the hammer at €4.7 million and fees bringing it to roughly €6 million. At 20.5 metres, Vulcain is the largest dinosaur skeleton ever sold at auction, more than 80 per cent original bone, and was excavated in Wyoming in 2018. The buyer, a French collector, said he intended to lend it to a museum or a scientific institution.

9. A Gorgosaurus — $6.1 million

Sotheby's, New York, 28 July 2022. Nearly ten feet tall and twenty-two feet long, about 76 million years old, and a close relative of Tyrannosaurus that hunted a few million years earlier. It was the first Gorgosaurus ever put up for public sale, and the only mounted example not already held by a museum.

10. "Maximus", a Tyrannosaurus rex skull — $6.1 million

Sotheby's, New York, 9 December 2022. A skull alone, weighing more than 200 pounds, unearthed in South Dakota, and the first stand-alone T. rex skull ever offered at public auction. It is on this list for the opposite reason to everything above it: the estimate was fifteen to twenty million dollars and it made less than half the bottom of that range. A few months later, in April 2023, the composite T. rex "Trinity" sold at Koller in Zurich for CHF 5.5 million with fees, also below expectations.

What a school hall can take from this

The two most useful numbers on this page are the estimates. Apex was expected to make five million and made forty-five. Maximus was expected to make fifteen million and made six. Both were catalogued by the same house, a few years apart. An estimate is a considered guess about how two strangers will behave in a room, and nobody is reliably good at it — which is a reason not to agonise over what your own lots are worth, and a reason not to set opening bids so high that the first bid never arrives. The guide covers how to pick opening bids that get a lot moving.

The second lesson is that every result above came from a handful of bidders, not a crowd. Seven people fought over Gus, six over the Ceratosaurus, seven over Apex. In a benefit auction the arithmetic is identical: two people who both refuse to lose a lot will do more for your total than twenty polite bids. That means knowing who is coming and what they care about before you finalise the lot list.

Third, timing decided all of these. Apex ran for fifteen minutes, Gus for ten, the Ceratosaurus for six, and in each case the last minute mattered most. If a lot closes at a fixed second, the bidder who was still deciding never gets to decide. A late bid should extend the lot rather than end it, and that behaviour, with the countdown and the running total on the big screen, is set out on the how it works page.

Fourth, the catalogue entries did real work. Nobody bid thirty million dollars on a photograph of some bones; they bid on the fact that this was the only juvenile of its species known. You are not writing a catalogue, but three honest sentences per lot explaining what the winner gets and who donated it will do more for your total than a better picture. Collectables and one-off experiences sold for a good cause behave much the same way, and there is more on that on the page for art auctions.

You can build a lot list and rehearse a full evening before deciding whether to run it for real. There is a walk-through at getting started.

Prices as reported at the time of sale; figures include the buyer's premium where stated.