A rare Nanotyrannus skeleton named 'Jodi' fetched $47.3 million including fees at Sotheby's, far above its $6–9 million estimate, and scientists have criticised the sale of such fossils into private hands.
A Nanotyrannus skeleton known as 'Jodi' sold for $47.3 million, including fees, at Sotheby's in New York on Tuesday, 27 October 2026, far exceeding its pre-sale estimate of $6 million to $9 million. According to Sotheby's, six bidders competed online and by telephone in a twelve-minute bidding battle before the fossil sold to a telephone bidder. The auction house says the result makes Jodi the second most valuable dinosaur ever sold at auction, and the buyer has not yet been identified publicly.
Sotheby's says the skeleton was discovered in 2019 by Jodi Pierson on her privately owned land in the Hell Creek Formation in Garfield County, Montana, near the town of Jordan, and that it measures about 19.6 feet (6 metres) from nose to tail and roughly 9.6 feet (2.9 metres) tall on its armature. It comprises around 191 fossil bone elements and, judging by size and bone development, belonged to an adult. Sotheby's describes it as one of only three substantial Nanotyrannus skeletons known to science and the first to reach the market since the genus was confirmed last autumn, noting that more than 150 morphological differences distinguish it from the much larger Tyrannosaurus rex, of which some researchers had once suggested it might simply be an adolescent.
The sale has drawn criticism from palaeontologists. Thomas R. Holtz Jr. of the University of Maryland, quoted by The Guardian, argued that museums are closing or under threat over costs a fraction of Jodi's price and that significant fossils can be lost to research when held privately, while Linda Ivany of Syracuse University told the New York Times that such fossils should stay in the public sphere. The accompanying Reuters video is a news report on the auction result rather than footage of the dinosaur's discovery, and the buyer's plans for the specimen remain unknown.
