The crazy market for fossilized dinosaurs

For the past month, a giant triceratops has taken its ease at 13, rue des Archives, in the heart of the Marais, in Paris. Its measurements make shudder: more than 7 meters long, nearly 3 meters high, and 650 kg, two horns of more than one meter capable, each, of supporting a pressure of 16 tons. Maxilla and claws to match. The kind of antediluvian animal you wouldn’t want to cross paths with.

This is Big John, the skeleton of a dinosaur over 66 million years old, featured in the Naturalia auction held on October 21 by Alexandre Giquello, in Drouot. Its estimate, between 1.2 and 1.5 million euros, is in line with its rarity and the madness that has gripped the fossil market for several years.

In October 2020, the Parisian auctioneer had already sold for 3 million euros an allosaur skeleton 10 meters long, 150 million years old. That same month, Christie’s auctioned off a skeleton of Tyrannosaurus Rex baptized Stan, among the most complete in the world. The specialists, who expected 10 million dollars, fell from their chairs. “After all, Stan is an icon, he’s the Caravaggio of the dinosaurs”, justifies the independent expert Iacopo Briano, daring without blinking the comparison with the Italian genius of the beginning of the XVIIe century.

Beware of puzzles

These enormous Jurassic-era beasts are now the latest “must” for collectors who already own the full panoply of statutory objects: the Jeff Koons sculpture in the living room, the Warhol on the wall and the Ferrari in the parking lot. To impress their guests, the megariches have found in these trophies something to feed their excess. Hollywood, of course, loves it.

In 2007, the actor Nicolas Cage had fought against his colleague Leonardo DiCaprio to take, for 267,000 dollars, a skull of Tyrannosaurus bataar 80 centimeters long. Sheikh Saoud Al-Thani of Qatar owned a dinosaur skeleton, which the emirate has never exhibited since his death.

For four years, the Chinese have also entered the round. As for the mineral and fossil exchanges in Munich, Germany, and Tucson, the United States, they are always full. You can find everything there, from T-Rex teeth, sold individually for around 5,000 euros, to the skeleton of a small dinosaur, around 250,000 euros.

Big John's ribs during assembly, before the dinosaur auction at the Drouot auction house in October.

Where does this bone rush come from? From the XIXe century, when these creatures, which have nothing chimerical, began to be exhumed. But it is above all the saga Jurassic Park, initiated in 1993 by Steven Spielberg, who popularized them – for the record, the penultimate part, Jurassic World, had garnered, in 2015, more than a billion dollars in revenue in two weeks. “Dinosaurs are dream objects”, summarizes Iacopo Briano. These are ” from memento mori “, adds James Hyslop, specialist at Christie’s, recalling the inevitable extinction of all species.

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