Rich People Are Buying So Many T. Rex Skeletons There Aren’t Enough Left for Scientists

If you thought Nicholas Cage buying a T. rex skull, expediting his inevitable bankruptcy, was just a one-off example of rich people unwisely spending their money, it turns out that might actually be the norm.

According to a new study in Palaeontologia Electronica, your favorite childhood dinosaur has become the plaything of the ultra-wealthy. They have turned their bones into a status symbol and, in the process, crushed the hopes and dreams of scientific researchers who need those bones to study so we can learn more about these long-extinct creatures.

T. Rex Skeletons Are Going to Rich People Instead of Scientists

It turns out that of all of the T. rex fossils in existence, only 141 of them are scientifically useful. 71 of those are unfortunately chilling in private collections. Or behind velvet ropes in billionaire basements. Or in storage units gathering dust and value, far away from the PhDs who actually want to study them.

This mess started in 1997 when “Sue,” a gorgeous, near-complete T. rex, was auctioned for $8.36 million, making fossils the new Furbies for the ultra-rich. In 2020, a T. rex fossil named “Stan” went for $31.8 million at Christie’s, ending up in a shiny Abu Dhabi museum.

Then came “Apex,” a Stegosaurus that sold for an absolutely ridiculous $44.6 million. Only one of the five auctioned T. rexes landed in a public institution. Meanwhile, commercial fossil hunters are digging up 2.4 times more T. rexes than public institutions.

Only 11 percent of those finds end up in museums or research collections. The rest end up gathering dust in an impotent rich guy’s trophy room.

Many of those privately held fossils are juveniles or teens, which provide a wealth of information crucial for understanding how T. rex grew up, and whether male and female T. rexes looked different, because we were still not sure about basic things like that.

Paleontology is being reduced to a rich guy’s scavenger hunt. And our collective knowledge of the most famous dinosaur ever is being hindered by the whims of the rich.