Wealthiest dinosaurs: Billionaire pays $44.6M for stegosaurus Apex

The saying "who can forbid the rich?" seems quite fitting here. At Sotheby's auction house in New York, a dinosaur skeleton, 150 million years old, went under the hammer. It was sold for a staggering $44.6 million, around 60 million CAD.

It stands 3.4 metres tall, measures 8.2 metres long, and has been named Apex. The stegosaurus was auctioned off to Ken Griffin, an American billionaire and owner of the international hedge fund Citadel.

As reports say this is the highest amount ever paid for a dinosaur skeleton.

But as it turns out, it's not the first. Nicolas Cage paid the equivalent of around 330,000 CAD for a tyrannosaurus skeleton. Leonardo DiCaprio had a mosasaur in his collection, and Russell Crowe bought a mosasaur skull from him, which he was forced to sell after an expensive divorce.

The good news is that the stegosaurus, by decision of its new owner, is set to go to an American museum. Griffin is once again making a gesture towards U.S. museums - in 2018, he sponsored a replica of a titanosaur, the largest dinosaur discovered to date, for $16.5 million. This replica went to a Chicago museum.

Before Apex went under the hammer, its value was estimated at $4 to $6 million. The billionaire surpassed this amount by a factor of ten.

However, he was not the first to invest millions of dollars in bones millions of years old. In 2020, at Christie's auction house in England, a T-Rex measuring 11.6 metres long was sold to a new owner for $31.8 million (around 43 million CAD).

Luxury today is buying what interests us, not what we associate with luxury - explains Cassandra Hatton, who specializes in science and pop culture auctions, in an interview with the "Financial Times."

Apex was discovered in a place aptly named Dinosaur, Colorado. His skeleton is mostly intact, believed to have lived to an old age, and the only ailment he suffered from was arthritis.