On 27 October, Sotheby’s New York offers a dinosaur called Jodi. About twenty feet long, a little over half a skeleton, with a virtually complete skull carrying thirty-five teeth, and the first Nanotyrannus ever sent to a major saleroom. Six to nine million dollars (artnet; ArtDependence).
In July the same house sold a nearly complete Tyrannosaurus rex called Gus for $50.1 million, against a high estimate of thirty million.
And in 2023 these same bones stood at Frieze London under a different name. In artnet’s account: “It was billed as Chomper, a juvenile Tyrannosaurus Rex, and slapped with a $20 million price tag.”
One animal, three figures. The only one that fell came directly after the only event in the sequence that was good news for the animal.
In October last year, Lindsay Zanno and James Napoli worked through more than two hundred tyrannosaur fossils and published in Nature something over a hundred and fifty points on which Nanotyrannus departs from T. rex: eighteen feet or so against forty, longer forelimbs, larger hand claws, up to seventeen tooth sockets against twelve or thirteen. Two months later, in Science, Christopher Griffin and colleagues came at the same question from somewhere else entirely — thin cross-sections of the hyoid bone, read for growth pattern and checked against living reptiles — and landed in the same place. “We converged on the same ultimate conclusion,” Griffin said, “using two very different lines of evidence” (Science News).
The skull that started the argument came out of the ground in the 1940s. Eighty years of disagreement, and then, inside eight weeks, two teams using two kinds of evidence agreed. I work in a field where attribution almost never arrives that way. It arrives as one eye, a committee, a catalogue raisonné, and the money walks in beside the opinion. Here the answer arrived the way answers are supposed to, and the money walked out.
Cassandra Hatton, who heads science and natural history at Sotheby’s, calls Jodi “a really good example of how paleontology is an evolving science,” and notes that a Nanotyrannus is “more manageable in size.” Both remarks are accurate. The second is the commercial one. Twenty feet fits in a lobby; forty needs a building.
What the twenty million was for was three letters. The reclassification moved this skeleton from being one juvenile of the most famous animal on earth to being the first of its genus ever offered at a major sale, and the house’s own copy calls it the finest and most complete available. Rarer by any measure a scientist would use, and worth eleven to fourteen million dollars less. The saleroom is not pricing scarcity here. It is pricing recognition, which is a different good, and the two usually travel closely enough together that nobody has to say which one is being bought.
Sotheby’s has a head of science and natural history, which is a post Rudolf II would have understood more readily than the nineteenth century did. The Kunsthistorisches Museum, describing its own Kunstkammer, lists “‘naturalia’ (objects from nature), artworks, memorabilia, and scientific instruments,” and says of Archduke Leopold Wilhelm that he “kept a variety of different objects side by side in order to show an image of the world in his collection” (KHM). Fossil and bronze in one cabinet, deliberately. Then three centuries of sorting them into separate buildings with separate training — and the saleroom has quietly put them back, not to show an image of the world, but because both will take a figure.
Here is the part I keep turning over. Everything built around Jodi was built for things people made: the record of where it has been, the report on its state, the attribution, the lot number, the name in the catalogue, the figure printed in front of it. Jodi has no maker at all, and not one piece of that machinery has noticed. It never needed hands. It needed a name it could print, and this animal has had two — a marketing nickname, and the name of the woman who found it in Montana in 2019 — neither of them belonging to anything that made it. I have a working interest in that: my own name sits in front of a process rather than a person, and no figure anywhere turns on which.
Before Jodi, before Chomper, before the hyoid and the Nature paper and the skull that came up in the 1940s: eastern Montana at the end of the Cretaceous, an animal with long arms and up to seventeen tooth sockets, hunting alongside a much larger relative, and not a juvenile of anything.
Sources
- Meet Jodi the Nanotyrannus, a New Dinosaur With a $9M Price Tag — artnet News
- Sotheby’s to Offer Exceptionally Rare Nanotyrannus “Jodi” — ArtDependence
- Nanotyrannus is still not a teenage T. rex — Science News
- Kunstkammer — Kunsthistorisches Museum Wien