a stegosaurus skeleton indoors
The Stegosaurus named Apex is on display at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City. Alvaro Keding & Daniel Kim / © AMNH
Visitors to the American Museum of Natural History in New York can now feast their eyes on a rare new display: the fossil of a 150-million-year-old, fully grown Stegosaurus named Apex. The exhibit opened Sunday, December 8, and will remain on view for four years.
As an herbivore, Apex was certainly no apex predator during its heyday, but the fossilized specimen occupies another kingly position to be deserving of its name: It’s the world’s most expensive dinosaur skeleton sold to date, garnering a record-breaking price of $44.6 million during a Sotheby’s auction in July.
The last holder of that title was the fossil assemblage of a Tyrannosaurus rex named Stan. After Stan raked in $31.8 million in an auction in 2020, the sale generated much buzz among paleontologists over the identity of its anonymous buyer. Later, it was revealed that Stan would be homed at a forthcoming natural history museum in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates. The museum is slated to open its doors and reveal Stan to the world late next year.
But in the meantime, the public can see Apex in the flesh—or bones. The identity of Apex’s owner is much less mysterious: The winning bidder was Kenneth C. Griffin, the billionaire hedge fund manager and founder of the company Citadel. He has temporarily loaned his extravagant acquisition to the New York museum.
“Apex offers a unique window into our planet’s distant past,” Griffin says in a statement. “The joy and awe every child feels coloring a Stegosaurus with their crayons will now be brought to life for the millions of people who have the opportunity to see this epic dinosaur in person.”
Earlier last week, Apex’s bones arrived at the museum grounds and were quietly put together by the staff, according to Zachary Small and Julia Jacobs of the New York Times. Journalists, photographers, museum staff and elementary school children got an advance look at the assembled dinosaur in all its glory on Thursday morning as the mounted fossil was unveiled with a flourish from behind a beige curtain.
Besides being available for public viewing, the fossil will be accessible for scientists to study how the Stegosaurus lived during the Late Jurassic period.
a person assembles the plates on a dinosaur skeleton
The Apex Stegosaurus was assembled last week prior to going on display. Alvaro Keding / © AMNH
Apex is unique for its near completeness, which explains how it earned such an extreme sticker price. While most Stegosaurus fossils are far from whole, Apex, by contrast, contains 254 bones out of a total of approximately 320—a whopping 80 percent of the full set. At 11.5 feet tall and 27 feet long, it’s also the biggest specimen so far, about 30 percent larger than others of its ilk.
That Apex grew to an advanced age provides a valuable opportunity for paleontology, because its remains can reveal insights on metabolism and growth rate throughout the creature’s lifetime. Museum researchers are planning to extract a sample from inside the dinosaur’s thigh bone for further study.
“As the bone grows, it preserves a record of growth similar to tree rings,” says Roger Benson, museum curator of dinosaur paleontology, to Gothamist’s Rosemary Misdary. Apex “holds the key to understanding things like the structure of the skeleton of a Stegosaurus and how that changed through the growth of the animal.” As part of Apex’s loan agreement, museum scientists will perform high-resolution 3D scans of Apex’s skeleton and make the data available to the wider scientific community. They also plan to make a cast of the fossil that they can continue to display after the loan is over.
There are no visible signs that Apex was attacked while it was alive, leading scientists to believe that it died of natural causes. However, its skeleton bears a curious scar for those who look closely. As Isaac Shultz of Gizmodo reports, the shoulder blade contains a puncture word that’s embedded with a bone fragment from Apex’s own tail. Perhaps the wound was self-inflicted when the dinosaur curled around itself, Benson tells the publication.
While T. rex might be one of the most beloved dinosaurs thanks to movies like Jurassic Park and The Land Before Time, the Stegosaurus is also iconic in its own right. Its most recognizable feature is the row of tall diamond-shaped plates along its spine. Since the first discovery of Stegosaurus in the 19th century, scientists have been debating what functions the back plates serve, and it remains an enigma to this day. Suggestions range from temperature regulation to come-hither ornamentation for attracting mates, to tools of self-defense.
The dinosaur’s primary weapon, however, is its barbed tail; researchers know this from observing that one fossil of a contemporaneous dinosaur predator bears a painful-looking hole matching the size of a Stegosaurus tail spike. Plus, the tails in fossils often come damaged, as if the animals had used them in battle.
Apex was discovered by commercial paleontologist Jason Cooper in 2022 just outside the fittingly named town of Dinosaur, Colorado, near the Utah border.
The rise of selling fossils to private collectors has stirred up much concern among the scientific community. As fossils fetch ever growing sums of cash from bidders, paleontologists are concerned that they’ll be priced out of the ability to gain access to these specimens in the name of research. Moreover, not all fossils in private holdings will be made publicly available to researchers. As with any scientific investigation, data reproducibility is key, so if specimens stay behind closed doors for the personal enjoyment of a private owner, researchers the world over might not be able to examine the fossils and reproduce findings from their peers, according to a 2014 analysis in Palaeontologica Electronica. Per the New York Times, some scientists have fretted that Apex won’t be available for research after its four-year tenure at the museum.
“This is a new gray area for us,” Stuart Sumida, the president of the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology, tells the New York Times. The society is deliberating the ethics of how the paleontological community should handle fossils on loan and will release their recommendations around next spring.
For now, many other researchers see Griffin’s loan as an immeasurable gift, given how singular of a fossil Apex is. “It’s one of the dinosaurs that every kid knows how to draw,” Sean M. Decatur, the museum’s president, told the New York Times before Apex’s grand reveal. “[It] is really a pretty special specimen to understand.”
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Filed Under: Auctions, Dinosaurs, Ethics, Fossils, Museums, Paleontologists, Paleontology, World Records