A predator that museums once labelled a teenage Tyrannosaurus rex has just become one of the most expensive fossils on the planet. On Tuesday evening in New York, Sotheby’s sold a mounted Nanotyrannus skeleton nicknamed Jodi for $47.3 million, several times its pre-sale estimate of around $9 million.
Six bidders competed for about twelve minutes before an anonymous buyer prevailed. Only Gus, a T. rex the same auction house sold for $50.1 million in July, has ever fetched more. The Stegosaurus Apex, a $44.6 million sale in 2024, now drops to third.
Jodi takes its name from rancher Jodi Pierson, on whose land in Montana’s Hell Creek Formation it was found, and was dug out by commercial fossil hunter Clayton Phipps. Standing about 2.9 metres tall and almost six metres long, it is one of only three known skeletons of its kind. Its scientific status was settled only last year, when work on the celebrated Duelling Dinosaurs specimen showed that Nanotyrannus is a separate genus. It shared the landscape with T. rex some 67 million years ago but was lighter, with longer forelimbs and slicing, blade-shaped teeth.
The result has revived an old quarrel. Edinburgh palaeontologist Steve Brusatte called it “harrowing” that a newly confirmed species might vanish into a collector’s vault. Portsmouth researcher Megan Jacobs was more relaxed, noting the heavy costs of excavation and predicting that such specimens tend to reach museums eventually.
Whoever owns Jodi now holds a piece of a scientific debate that lasted decades.
