Who Owns the World’s Most Valuable Fossils?
1. The $50 Million Dinosaur
On July 14, 2026, a Tyrannosaurus rex nicknamed Gus sold at Sotheby’s New York for $50.13 million, including the buyer’s premium, making it the most expensive dinosaur fossil ever sold at auction. Discovered on private ranchland in South Dakota in 2021, the 67-million-year-old specimen was excavated over three summer seasons between 2021 and 2023, and the wider work of excavation, mapping and restoration took five years. The Sotheby’s lot describes it as about 61% complete by bone count, with the surviving elements representing 75 to 80% of the animal’s estimated bone mass. Less than four months later, on October 27, Sotheby’s sold an almost 20-foot-long Nanotyrannus named Jodi for $47.3 million. Both buyers remain anonymous, the Associated Press reported.
The prices reflect buyer demand; a fossil’s scientific importance depends on what it can reveal and on the quality of its research record. What the prices expose is a question that different legal systems answer differently: whether ownership of the physical specimen also decides who can study it, where it can be held, and whether the country of discovery keeps any meaningful claim over its scientific heritage. Ownership depends on the law of the place where a fossil is found, the rights attached to the land, its export history and any later transfer. A museum displaying a specimen may own it, hold it on loan or simply provide it a research home.
2. The New Billionaire Market
Public museums can struggle to acquire significant privately assembled fossil collections, as the Dorset case in Section 6 demonstrates. When the Stegosaurus Apex sold for $44.6 million at Sotheby’s in July 2024, the winning bidder was billionaire investor Kenneth C. Griffin. Apex is now on a four-year loan to the American Museum of Natural History in New York, where it can be exhibited and studied, and a cast is due to replace the original afterwards. The loan leaves ownership with Griffin.
Governments and state-backed museums are buyers too. In October 2020, Christie’s sold the T. rex skeleton Stan for $31.8475 million. The Abu Dhabi Department of Culture and Tourism was identified as the buyer and announced Stan’s public display. The specimen went on view when the Natural History Museum Abu Dhabi opened in November 2025, where it is one of the museum’s major highlights.
3. The American Model
The United States is a major centre of the high-value fossil auction market. Its private-land ownership framework provides a legal route for commercial collecting. Fossils discovered on private land are generally subject to the landowner’s property rights. Ownership can nevertheless become complicated when surface and mineral rights have been separated. In Murray v. BEJ Minerals, the Montana Supreme Court held in 2020 that dinosaur fossils were not minerals under a general mineral reservation.
Federal land follows a different regime. Collection of vertebrate fossils generally requires a federal permit. Specimens collected under such permits remain US government property and must be preserved for the public in an approved repository, as 16 USC §470aaa-3 and §470aaa-4 provide. Gus, Jodi and Apex were all discovered on private American land.
Land title can still complicate matters severely. Sue was discovered in 1990 on Indian trust land within the Cheyenne River Sioux Reservation. Legal title to the land was held by the United States in trust for Maurice A. Williams. The resulting dispute, decided in Black Hills Institute v. Department of Justice, involved the respective rights of the landowner, the excavators and the federal government. After a prolonged legal battle, Sue was sold at Sotheby’s on October 4, 1997 for $8,362,500, including the buyer’s premium. The Field Museum acquired the specimen with financial support from McDonald’s, Disney, the California State University system and other contributors.
4. The National Heritage Model
Other nations reverse the American starting point. Where US law begins with the landowner, they begin with the state.
Mongolia’s Cultural Heritage Protection Law states that discoveries in areas containing scientifically important properties are state-owned (Article 30). The sale of paleontological findings is prohibited (Article 35), though the law provides for authorized temporary exports of research samples (Article 52). The Mongolian government argues that the Gobi’s Cretaceous deposits must remain under national control rather than become commodities in a foreign market.
China enforces a similar framework. Its Regulations on Protection of Fossils establish that fossils within its territory are owned by the state. Foreign excavation requires approved cooperation with Chinese institutions, while exports of specially protected specimens require state approval under specified research and exhibition exceptions.
5. The Repatriation Battles
One of the most consequential trafficking cases involved American commercial fossil dealer Eric Prokopi. In 2012, Prokopi pleaded guilty in the U.S. after attempting to sell a nearly complete Tarbosaurus bataar skeleton that had been illegally removed from Mongolia. In 2014 the U.S. Department of Justice announced the return of fossils representing more than 18 dinosaur skeletons to Mongolia, the end of a two-year effort that combined civil forfeiture actions, a criminal prosecution and separate civil recoveries. The case showed that a fossil can reach a Western auction block even when its extraction was illegal. In a separate incident, actor Nicolas Cage surrendered a Tarbosaurus bataar skull he had bought at auction in 2007. His representative said the surrender was voluntary, and it followed a federal forfeiture action against the skull.
Brazil has also sought the return of important fossils held abroad. Its law, dating to Decree-Law 4,146 of 1942, treats fossil deposits as national property, and the national mining agency says extraction requires authorisation or notification and that permits cannot be granted specifically to extract fossils for commercial sale. In 2019, Nature reported that a French court ordered the return of 45 fossils to Brazil. More recently, after a scientific controversy, Germany and Brazil negotiated a diplomatic return of the roughly 110-million-year-old Ubirajara jubatus fossil. It was transferred to a Brazilian museum in June 2023, accompanied by a new framework for scientific cooperation.
Together, these cases show that repatriation depends on the source country’s laws, the evidence establishing provenance and the cooperation of the country holding the specimen.
6. Britain’s Fossil Dilemma
The United Kingdom shows how a legal fossil market can still lose important material. As in the U.S., fossils in England generally belong initially to the landowner. Under the West Dorset Code, Category I fossils include specimens that may represent new species, exceptionally rare finds and material of exceptional preservation, and collectors intending to sell or dispose of them must first offer them to UK-registered museums for six months. The code is voluntary and applies to land owned by the National Trust and Charmouth Parish Council within the specified West Dorset area; the Undercliffs reserve operates under a separate code.
In August 2026, The Guardian revealed that Dorset collector Chris Moore had sold 318 Jurassic fossils from the Dorset coast to the Natural History Museum Abu Dhabi. Both the Natural History Museum in London and Museum Wales declined the offer, citing a lack of funding. One curator also highlighted storage space, curatorial time and packaging materials as practical challenges. The Abu Dhabi museum said a large majority of the collection was on display in its Mesozoic Gallery, and nothing suggested the sale broke any rules.
The sale exposed a gap in British export law. The UK’s cultural-goods export controls do not cover fossils, because they apply to made objects. West Dorset MP Edward Morello urged ministers to change export rules so that exceptionally important fossils could be temporarily prevented from leaving the UK. Separately, Lyme Regis Museum called for fossils meeting the Waverley criteria to receive export protection and for a national register of significant discoveries, as the Museums Association reported.
British law also shows a different route by which fossil ownership can come under scrutiny: financial asset recovery. In November 2025, the National Crime Agency announced a civil settlement under the Proceeds of Crime Act in an unexplained-wealth-order case involving Singapore-based businessman Su Binghai. Three dinosaur skeletons, previously sold at Christie’s for £12.405 million, were forfeited. The case shows how high-value specimens can become recoverable assets in financial investigations, independently of any dispute over their excavation or export.
7. The Scientific Argument
For many vertebrate paleontologists, the concern is whether scientifically important specimens will remain available for research after entering private collections.
The Society of Vertebrate Paleontology’s ethics bylaw states that scientifically significant fossils should be curated in repositories committed to permanent preservation and study. It does not condone the barter, sale or purchase of such fossils unless the transaction brings them into, or keeps them within, a public trust. The society also urged Gus’s eventual buyer to donate the specimen to an accredited natural history museum. A privately owned fossil may become inaccessible to researchers, and repeated commercial transfers can make long-term scientific access harder to guarantee.
Commercial collecting also has a scientific case. The Natural History Museum notes that some important specimens might never be discovered without commercial collectors, whose field techniques have also contributed to professional paleontology. Along the rapidly eroding Dorset coast, responsible recovery can save fossils that the sea would otherwise destroy, a point the West Dorset Code itself makes. The challenge is to ensure that excavation preserves a specimen’s geological context and that important finds remain available for research.
The $47.3 million sale of Jodi sharpens the concern. For decades, researchers debated whether Nanotyrannus was a distinct genus or simply a juvenile T. rex. A 2025 study in Nature provided evidence that it was a distinct genus, and a January 2026 study in Science of the holotype’s ceratobranchial (hyoid) histology concluded that the specimen was nearing or had reached skeletal maturity. That finding coincided with Jodi’s auction. The auction reporting records no public research-access arrangement, so the specimen’s future availability to independent researchers remains uncertain.
8. The International Legal Puzzle
There is no single international law that automatically assigns every fossil to either the country where it was discovered or the person who found it. The 1970 UNESCO Convention covers objects of paleontological interest, but only when a state has specifically designated them as important for science or another listed purpose.
The commercial market also meets academic standards. For new species-group names published after 1999, ICZN Article 16.4.2 requires authors, where the type specimens are extant, to state that they are or will be deposited in an identified collection. Recommendation 16C encourages deposition in institutions that preserve specimens and make them accessible for research.
A March 2025 study in Geoheritage assembled records available online for 10,471 fossil sales between 2010 and 2022, covering in-person and online auctions at 115 auction houses. It found that 87% of the identified auction houses were in the United States, while Africa and Asia together accounted for approximately 54% of the reported fossil origins. Geographic provenance appeared in 92% of the records, but this usually meant a country or continent, and precise discovery sites were rare. Catawiki’s records covered only 2022, and the figures describe the observed auction sample, not the entire fossil trade. The study did not investigate the legality of individual excavations or exports, but the lack of site-level provenance limits what can be independently established from auction listings.
9. Conclusion
The cases in this article show that the owner of a fossil, the institution that holds it and the researchers who can reach it are often three different parties. Apex remains privately owned while displayed at the American Museum of Natural History. Stan, acquired by Abu Dhabi’s Department of Culture and Tourism, is displayed at the Natural History Museum Abu Dhabi. Chris Moore’s Dorset fossils were collected in Britain and acquired by an institution in the UAE.
The unresolved question is whether ownership of an irreplaceable fossil should carry enforceable obligations to preserve it, make it available for research and protect the scientific heritage of the country where it was found.
