Dino Nuggets
Hi Friends!
This week, Sotheby’s auction house ran something pretty interesting across their auction block. Discovered sometime in the late ’90s at the Morrison formation in Wyoming, they presented what is believed to be the only complete juvenile Ceratosaurus skeleton known to exist. The subject of a painstaking extraction, restoration and display process, this example sits squarely at the crossroads between science, history and art. Original pre-auction estimate was $4,000,000 to $6,000,000 million, but when the dust settled, final price reached a whopping $30,500,000.
This is hardly the only example of something like this happening. In 2024, Citadel CEO Ken Griffin purchased another Morrison extraction, a complete Stegosaurus skeleton referred to as “Apex” for several times it’s pre-auction estimate at $44.6 million. Additionally, in 2020, Christie’s hammered a complete Tyrannosaurus Rex for $32 million and partial skeletons, skulls, etc routinely sell in the seven figure range. Point is, commercial archeology and natural history is now becoming a serious high-end collectible.
It’s a long been theorized that part of the reason that the generational shift in the collector car market has moved so slowly is the emergence, availability and appeal of alternative, investment level collectibles. We’ve seen things like art toys and sneakers shoot up like crazy in the last couple years. Additionally, things like vintage guitars that normally sold for just a few thousand dollars are now (in the case of things like late ’50s Gibson Les Paul “Bursts” and pre-CBS era Fender Stratocasters and Telecasters) firmly in the six-figure price range and sometimes several times over. Cryptocurrency has also attracted the eye of virtually every investor at every level across the globe.
I tend to have a knack for getting myself into seemingly very normal types of interactions with thoroughly extraordinary people. I’ve kind of done this repeatedly throughout the course of my career (both here and prior), where I’ll wake up in the morning on an average, regular day with nothing terribly interesting on my agenda, but somehow a few hours later, I wind up sitting across from somebody who’s done something significant somewhere and just kind of having a conversation. A few years ago, I had one of these scenarios unfold, where I wound up sitting across the table from somebody pretty important in the fine art world. They kind of broke things down in a way that made a lot of sense to me and kind of mapped out a progression that I’ve noticed repeatedly ever since. When people start to make money, they get the watch, then they get the cars, then they start buying art.
Make no mistake, fine art is the top of the mountain. Results achieved in the collector car market that make national news happen pretty routinely in the art world and without a doubt, art is still king. With this said, special vehicles still present a mass appeal and are almost a critical step on the ladder for virtually any collector of any kind.
Although we don’t know who bought the Ceratosaurus, we again, do know who bought Apex and we also know that he has a car collection. Same thing goes for most of the crypto bros. The desire to get money for cars is one of the reasons that they get involved in that world in the first place. If you’re out there in the world and you’re in a position to drop seven figures (or more) on a dinosaur skull, chances are pretty good you’ve got a Ferrari 250 GTL Lusso, a Mercedes 300 SL Gullwing, a late model exotic or something along those lines already sitting around someplace.
Cars are a universal collectible that reach further and deeper into people than almost anything else on Earth and I think these new forms of investing have had little to no effect on any of the real reasons that people buy cars. The bigger picture I think comes down to holes in discretionary earning years, lack of available opportunity to move up the ladder and corporate involvement in things that normally corporate involvement didn’t exist in prior, making it more difficult for the next generation to acquire the resources to get involved in collector cars at the same level as the previous ones have.
If you’re buying things like this at levels like this, chances are good that you’ve already been up the ladder and are involved in cars, watches, fine art, crypto, etc and this is just another thing.
I’ll admit though, this stuff is fascinating and I’ve been watching really closely. I also think that commercial archeology is actually kind of a good thing as well. For the amount of time, energy, resources and skill that it takes to put something like this together, the people that unearth and preserve this stuff are not only scientists, but artists and deserve to be rewarded for their work. Also, if they know that money like this is available to them out there, the level of preservation that will be done on finds like this moving forward will probably be significantly higher, making them better and easier to preserve for future generations. Of course, the argument exists that this stuff belongs in a museum and shouldn’t be run across the block in private sales this way, but the reality is, almost all of this stuff will wind up on permanent loan somewhere eventually (for example, Apex currently resides in the American Natural History Museum in New York City), so in reality, although there definitely could be ethical issues that arise, for right now, everybody kind of wins here.
This is really interesting stuff for sure……
That’s it for this week……
Darin Roberge
