People look at a nearly complete stegosaurus fossil on display at Sotheby’s on July 10, 2024, in New York City.
Alexi Rosenfeld | Getty Images
Billionaire investor Ken Griffin, founder and CEO of the hedge fund Citadel, bought a Late Jurassic stegosaurus skeleton at Sotheby’s on Wednesday for $44.6 million, the most expensive fossil ever sold at auction.
The 150-million-year-old stegosaurus, named “Apex,” is 11 feet tall, about 27 feet long from nose to tail, and is a nearly complete skeleton containing 254 fossil bone elements. The expected auction price for Apex was just $6 million.
Griffin, who won the bid after 15 minutes competing with six other bidders at a live auction in New York on Wednesday, is considering loaning the specimen to a U.S. institution, according to a person with knowledge of the plans.
“Apex was born in America and it will stay in America!” Griffin said after the sale.
Sotheby’s said Apex showed no signs of battle wounds or post-mortem scavenging. The stegosaurus was unearthed on private land in Moffat County, Colorado.
In 2018, Griffin donated $16.5 million to Chicago’s Field Museum to help fund a touchable model of a gigantic, long-necked, herbivorous dinosaur from Argentina, the largest dinosaur ever discovered.
In 2021, he bought a first edition of the U.S. Constitution for $43.2 million, outbid by a group of crypto investors. He then loaned it to the Crystal Bridges Museum of Art in Arkansas.
