The mounted skeleton of a newly-identified dinosaur once mistaken for a young Tyrannosaurus rex is up for auction - with a price-tag of at least $6m (£4.5m). Nicknamed "Jodi", the roughly 10-foot-tall (3m) skeleton will be auctioned by Sotheby's in New York. The sale comes a year after researchers confirmed that the skeleton belongs to a distinct genus.
The Late Cretaceous carnivore is expected to fetch up to $9m when it goes under the hammer later today. The auction comes after Sotheby's sold a Tyrannosaurus rex, dubbed "Gus", for a record $50.1m (£37.4m) in July. The sales comes as some in the scientific community debate whether dinosaur remains should be sold privately.
Sotheby's describes "Jodi" as an "excellent exhibition-ready" skeleton with about 191 fossil-bone elements and a "beautifully preserved, virtually complete skull". The auction house adds that the Nanotyrannus is "one of only three such skeletons known to science." The specimen is the first to come to market since the existence of the genus was confirmed by US researchers last October, Sotheby's said. Megan Jenkins, a palaeontologist at the University of Portsmouth, told the BBC's Today programme on Tuesday that Nanotyrannus "was for a very long time believed to be sort of a teenager of T. rex".
"But it's a lot smaller and its a lot more gracile. So it's very sort-of sleek, slender, [with] blade-like teeth for slicing through meat," Jenkins said. Tyrannosaurus rex and Nanotyrannus lived alongside one another during the same geological period approximately 67 million years ago.
"Jodi" was initially exhibited as a juvenile T. rex at London's Frieze Masters international art fair in October 2023, before the Nanotyrannus genus was classified. The skeleton was discovered in the US state of Montana by rancher Jodi Pierson on her land in the Hall Creek Formation, a heavily studied geological site. It was later excavated by commercial palaeontologist Clayton Phipps.
Phipps also discovered the famous "Dueling Dinosaurs" fossil. That specimen, which shows the remains of a Nanotyrannus and Triceratops apparently in combat, was found eight miles (13km) away from "Jodi" in 2006. The "Dueling Dinosaurs" discovery became crucial to the research published by Lindsay Zanno and James Napoli that classified Nanotyrannus as separate from T. rex.
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