Epilogue
THE SIDEWALKS WERE UNUSUALLY EMPTY FOR A MID-September afternoon in Rockefeller Center. Gone were the office workers who would normally be found seeking out the last vestiges of the summer sun, like squirrels trying to save acorns for the winter. No packs of tourists congregated outside the studio windows of the Today show. No one was lined up for a tour of 30 Rockefeller Center, or for a show at Radio City Music Hall. For six months, life throughout the country had largely retreated indoors in response to the coronavirus pandemic, leaving the city streets quiet. And yet for those who found themselves walking outdoors at the corner of Forty-ninth Street and Fifth Avenue in the late summer of 2020, there stood a 13-foot-tall treat: a fully-mounted T. rex, one of the most complete specimens ever found.
The creature was frozen mid-roar in the windows of the auction house Christie’s, which redesigned its public galleries so that the T. rex could be seen from outside. Known as Stan in honor of the amateur paleontologist named Stan Sacrison who discovered it in the Black Hills of South Dakota in 1987, the approximately 67-million-year-old specimen was unique not only for the relatively pristine condition of its bones, but for what they suggested about its life. Punctures in its skull and fused neck vertebrae hinted that it had survived an attack from another T. rex, perhaps the only animal capable of inflicting such damage on an eight-ton creature of destruction. Christie’s estimated that the bones would go for up to $8 million, an unheard-of amount for a natural history object that put it out of the reach of most museums in the country.
The T. rex fossil was deliberately priced like a piece of art, not a specimen of science. “There simply aren’t T. rexes like this coming to market. It’s an incredibly rare event when a great one is found,” said James Hyslop, head of Christie’s Science and Natural History Department, before the sale. “T. rex is a brand name in a way that no other dinosaur is. It sits very naturally against a Picasso, a Jeff Koons or an Andy Warhol.” In the October 6, 2020, auction catalog for what Christie’s called the Twentieth Century Evening Sale, photos of the T. rex were found just a few pages away from a Jasper Johns with a high estimate of $1.8 million, a Picasso from a private European collection with a high estimate of $30 million and a Mark Rothko with a high estimate of $50 million.
The idea that science and culture were natural rivals was made plain with the establishment of the American Museum of Natural History and the Metropolitan Museum of Art on opposite sides of Central Park. Yet in time that divide dwindled, like a forest slowly encroaching on an open field. That fossils could indeed be valued like pieces of art was first proven on October 4, 1997. That day, nine people walked into in an auction room at Sotheby’s in Manhattan and took their seats. In front of them, the 600-pound skull of a Tyrannosaurus rex rested on a cushion. It was but one piece of a specimen, nicknamed Sue, that was at the time the largest and most complete T. rex ever found. In the crowd sat representatives from the Smithsonian, the Field Museum and the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences, all of whom coveted the prestige and popularity that only a massive T. rex could offer.
That a museum would end up with the specimen was not guaranteed. A real estate baron named Jay Kislak was also in the room and prepared to bid, hoping to add Sue to a private collection that already included a 1516 original copy of the Carta Marina Navigatoria, the first printed navigational map of the world, and a 1486 edition of Ptolemy’s Cosmographia, which revolutionized medieval mapmaking by basing its representations of countries and geographical features on mathematical proportions and not their social importance. Sotheby’s hoped to steer the specimen to a public institution by giving the winning bidder three years to complete payment, allowing a chance for a fundraising push. “We weren’t selling something that should go to a decorator,” an executive at the company later said. Yet there were no guarantees. As the auction began, it was the first time that so large a dinosaur would be auctioned off publicly, and the world waited to find out just how much a complete T. rex was worth.
Sotheby’s had little experience estimating the value of fossils, much less those of a nearly perfectly preserved monster. The auction house officially said that the fossil was worth “$1 million plus,” though it had nothing to compare it to, no equivalent Michelangelos or Leonardos to set a floor. At the time, no fossil had ever sold for more than $600,000. In private, auctioneers guessed that it would go for up to $5 million, a figure that some argued was too low and others said was absurd for a single specimen.
“I begin with a bid of $500,000,” David Redden, the Sotheby’s auctioneer, said in an English accent dulled by decades spent in America. Trim and well-dressed, Redden was used to high-stakes affairs. He had joined the auction house in 1974, and in that time he had stood in the same spot selling all kinds of items, from an original copy of the Declaration of Independence for $2.2 million to several lots of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis’s belongings. But he had never sold a dinosaur.
Of the roughly fifty T. rex specimens that have been uncovered since Brown’s first discovery in 1905, only a quarter contain more than half of the dinosaur’s complete set of bones. Sue, by comparison, was more than 90 percent complete and stretched 42 feet from snout to tail, with an oversized rib cage, as if the creature had just filled its lungs with a deep gulp of air. The specimen was named after Sue Hendrickson, who discovered it while working as an intern at the Black Hills Institute, a commercial fossil dealer. In August 1990, a truck carrying prospectors from the private company broke down with a flat tire while scouting the property of Maurice Williams, a Sioux Indian who lived on a ranch north of Faith, South Dakota. Hendrickson stayed behind with the vehicle while the others left to get help. To pass the time, she went on a stroll, and soon looked up and spotted a gigantic femur and three vertebrae sticking out of a cliff face seven feet above her head. She immediately recognized them as the bones of “a carnivore and definitely big, which for that area could only mean one thing,” she later said. The Black Hills Institute paid Williams $5,000 for the right to excavate, remove and retain ownership of the bones.
As preparators at the company studied the bones, they noticed that the creature had sustained a number of painful wounds, a testament to its likely old age. Gashes from serrated dinosaur teeth marked the skull, while several arm bones on its right side were broken. Uric acid crystals were present in the joints, a sign that it likely suffered from gout. Here was not only a massive dinosaur, but one that carried with it the scars of prehistoric life. When the creature died, it had been quickly buried in water and sediment, preserving in its matrix of rock not only its skeleton but the bones of a prehistoric turtle that lived at the same time.
Two years after its discovery, an assistant United States attorney by the name of Kevin Schieffer charged that the Black Hills Institute had stolen the fossil by not obtaining necessary permissions from federal agencies before excavating on land within an Indian reservation. FBI agents seized the plaster jackets containing Sue’s bones and locked them under seal in a furnace room at the South Dakota School of Mines and Technology. In 1994, Williams was named the rightful owner of the specimen, and Sotheby’s was chosen to sell it on his behalf.
The price surpassed $1 million a few seconds after bidding opened. When it topped $1.7 million, a South Dakota businessman named Stan Adelstein dropped out, noting with pain that his target price had already been exceeded by more than half a million dollars. The bidding continued in $100,000 increments. Among those left were the Smithsonian, whose lack of a T. rex was, its curators felt, the only thing keeping the institution out of the elite company of the world’s best collections of dinosaurs, and the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences, which was the largest natural history museum in the American South and had built a massive war chest to bid on the T. rex in the hope that the acquisition would take it out of the league of regional museums and into the company of world-class institutions like the American Museum of Natural History. In addition to the representatives in the room itself, there were also eleven mystery bidders following the auction by phone, adding to the uncertainty of the outcome. “There were rumors flying that Michael Jackson was bidding,” the director of the North Carolina Museum later said.
Finally, the North Carolina Museum was the only museum left bidding on the floor itself. Its final offer was $7.2 million; Kislak, the Florida collector, bumped it out of the running with a bid of $7.3 million. Only then did the Field Museum in Chicago, the institution that had once seemed poised to become the nation’s premier home of dinosaurs before it abruptly canceled its funding for prospecting during a low point in Barnum Brown’s career, come in with an offer: $7.4 million.
“We did not have an iconic specimen, and we wanted one,” the Field’s president and chief executive at the time later said. Before the auction, the museum had reached out to Fred Turner, who was then the chief executive of McDonald’s Corporation—which had its corporate headquarters in suburban Chicago—in hopes that the company would help it acquire the specimen. “I got about 30 seconds into my pitch and Fred said, “You mean to tell me this is the world’s most complete, largest T. rex? I told him yes. He said, ‘We’re in,’ ” the Field’s president would later say. McDonald’s then asked the Walt Disney Company to join in the bidding consortium. Disney planned to create a life-size cast of the specimen for its Animal Kingdom theme park in Orlando, while McDonald’s was preparing to make two casts as part of a traveling exhibit at regional museums around the world.
Kislak raised the stakes once more, bidding $7.5 million. Though that was the Field’s predetermined limit, the museum put in one final bid, for $7.6 million. Redden called out for a better offer three times before dropping the hammer, completing the most expensive auction for a dinosaur fossil in history. At a total of $8.36 million after the auction house’s fees, a Tyrannosaurus rex was now worth as much as works by European masters, spurring rural landowners to try to strike it rich with bone hunters. “After Sue, it was truly frightening,” one National Park Service geologist said. “You heard people saying, ‘I’m going to give up my blue-collar job and move out West to find my million-dollar dinosaur.’ ”
Sue was unveiled at the north entrance to the Field Museum’s central hall on May 17, 2000. The day before, McDonald’s began advertising its tie-in with Disney’s animated movie Dinosaur, which opened in theaters that weekend. Included in McDonald’s prize giveaways were a $1 million check, a trip to a Britney Spears concert and countless Happy Meal toys that included dinosaur squirt guns.
In 2020, there were no such pairings of private companies and public institutions. The field was narrowed in part by the bizarre stipulation that the sale did not include full ownership of its intellectual property, which would be necessary to reproduce the specimen for three-dimensional models or related merchandise that could help recoup the costs. “We would never purchase something unless we owned the rights,” said Mark Norell, a paleontologist at the American Museum of Natural History. Still, interest kept rising. Hyslop began the bidding at $3 million. Buyers on phones in London and New York topped that in increments of $100,000. After twenty minutes of flurry, it was over: a private buyer working through the London office of Christie’s offered $31.8 million, including the auction house’s fees. The buyer’s identity was not disclosed, though it was widely believed that the purchaser came from an oil-rich state in the Middle East. That the bid came through London “usually means it’s Middle Eastern money, and I know for a fact that there was Middle Eastern interest in the fossil,” Norell said.
Whether Stan will ever again be seen in public is not known. During the Gilded Age, business titans such as J. P. Morgan and Andrew Carnegie spent millions to fund expeditions that uncovered and displayed dinosaurs in public museums as a testament to their own prosperity and power. More than a hundred years later, that instinct has shifted toward private displays of wealth. The T. rex remains one of the most elusive and sought-after fossils by both public and private collectors. In 2007, actors Leonardo DiCaprio and Nicolas Cage fought a bidding war over the 32-inch skull of a Tyrannosaurus bataar, a close cousin of the T. rex. Cage won with a $276,000 bid, but a few weeks before Christmas in 2015 returned it by order of the Department of Homeland Security, after it was discovered to have been smuggled out of Mongolia. Nathan Myhrvold, a former chief technology officer at Microsoft, installed a life-size cast of a T. rex in the living room of his Seattle-area home, to commemorate his funding of digs that helped uncover nine T. rex specimens in Montana at a time when only eighteen had previously been known to science.
Stan’s auction price of more than $31 million pushes the likely price of the next T. rex specimen that goes on sale even higher, another side effect of the widening barbells of wealth disparity worldwide. “It’s an astounding amount of money,” Darla Zelenitsky, associate professor of dinosaur paleobiology at the University of Calgary, told the New York Times. “I think it would make it tough for museums to buy fossils, especially at a price peg like that.”
Museums that do not have the means to purchase specimens on their own are finding themselves in the odd position of acting as showrooms for fossil hunters who own a T. rex but do not have connections with potential buyers. Alan Detrich, an amateur fossil hunter in Kansas, lent the skeleton of a four-year-old T. rex he found near Jordan, Montana, to the University of Kansas Biodiversity Institute and Natural History Museum. Two years later, he put the specimen on eBay with a starting bid of $2.95 million. “Most likely the only BABY T-Rex in the World!” he boasted. The museum asked that Detrich remove from the advertisement any reference to the specimen’s display on its floor. He complied, though he seemed confused as to why someone would fault him for selling it. “Well, I own this thing. It is mine. I can do whatever I want,” he told a reporter. Besides, he added, “It’s very hard to reach a billionaire. Putting it on eBay is one way to do it.”
Overall, nearly 300,000 potential bidders viewed Christie’s online listing for Stan, shattering the auction house’s viewership records. It is yet one more sign that Tyrannosaurus rex remains surprisingly alive for a creature that went extinct 66 million years ago. Researchers studying the animal now know that, far from being lumbering brutes, T. rex were intelligent creatures that lived in complex social systems. They were blessed with oversized nostrils and eyes and an outsized brain case that likely gave them a superb sense of sight and smell, fashioning them into formidable hunters at a time when the Earth’s temperatures were near their highest in known history. The eldest known T. rex specimen, nicknamed Scotty, most likely weighed 9.8 tons and was probably in its early thirties when it died in what is now Saskatchewan, Canada. Its skull was covered with bumps and ridges down the snout, suggesting armored skin. “It has flair to its face,” said W. Scott Persons, a paleontologist from the University of Alberta, who led a study of the specimen. The animal’s long legs, meanwhile, gave it a stride that conserved energy even as it ran at speeds of 10 miles per hour or more, allowing it to use up to 35 percent less energy than other dinosaurs of similar size, according to a 2020 study. Studies now suggest that 20,000 adult T. rex lived in North America at any given time. Over the 2.4 million years it was in existence, a total of some 2.5 billion adult T. rex walked the Earth. Given that paleontologists now estimate that only one out of every 80 million T. rex that ever lived was fossilized, Brown’s discovery of three of them becomes all the more astounding.
Over the last thirty years, expeditions in Mongolia and China have found numerous other types of tyrannosaur that in some cases were as small as a chicken, increasing the total species count threefold. The search for additional family members of T. rex is at the center of what is considered a new golden age of paleontology, when increasingly sophisticated technology and renewed sources of funding are fueling a deeper understanding of the planet’s past at a time when its climate is once again rapidly changing. “More is going on now than ever,” Philip J. Currie, a paleontologist at the University of Alberta, told the New York Times. “There were probably only six of us in the world who were paid,” he said, to focus solely on the study of dinosaurs when he began in the 1970s, adding, “Right now, there’s maybe 150,” along with a “colossal increase in the number of scientific papers.”
It’s fair to wonder how much of the history of life on this planet would remain unknown today had Barnum Brown never escaped the life that was set out for him on his family farm. What would a modern world without a T. rex look like? It’s easy to list the billions of dollars in box-office receipts that were brought in by the appearance of a snarling T. rex, the countless children’s toys and pajamas with the dinosaur’s image, the tourist attractions ranging from roadside fossil digs in Montana to roller coasters named after the planet’s most ferocious beast; all of which would be lost. Yet its influence is greater than that. Without the T. rex, it’s likely that dinosaurs would have remained little more than novelties, never inspiring the public and scientists alike to imagine a complex former world or prompting them to mine the past for clues on how a rapidly-changing climate once upended the dominant species of the prehistoric past. Every child that attends a natural history museum on a field trip has Barnum Brown—and the T. rex—to thank. While some paleontologists resent the attention that a T. rex draws compared with other species, the animal’s celebrity has a way of bringing science into a conversation from which it might have otherwise been excluded. “People who study non-dinosaurs say dinosaurs get all the attention,” said Stephen Bursatte, a paleontologist at the University of Edinburgh. “People who study dinosaurs say theropods get all the attention. People who study theropods say, oh, tyrannosaurs get all the attention.”
As temperatures continue to rise today, we can look at the fossils of a T. rex and see a glimpse of what may become of humankind if we do not take more steps to address the climate crisis. In the end, that could be the most important lesson we can draw from the fearsome reign of the T. rex: in the battle for life on Earth, the climate always wins.
The animal at the intersection of popular culture and modern science still stands on the fourth floor of a building in Manhattan on the edge of Central Park. There, with the noise of New York City reduced to little more than a murmur, visitors find themselves gazing across a 66-million-year gap at the greatest predator that nature ever produced—and whose discovery was the greatest legacy of a man who could not be contained.