Crypto News: Bw Reads: Battle over the T. rex bones

Welcome to Bw Reads, our weekend newsletter featuring one great magazine story from Bloomberg Businessweek. Today Bloomberg News wealth reporter Devon Pendleton writes about how dinosaurs have become an asset class for billionaires. And the market is about as orderly and genteel as a starving T. rex. You can find the whole story online (free!) here.

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It was supposed to be an unprecedented sale for the world’s wealthiest collectors. Shen, a Tyrannosaurus rex, was set to be the first of its kind ever sold at auction in Asia. The reconstructed creature, whose name means “godlike” in Chinese, was tens of millions of years old and longer than a city bus, frozen midstep with its massive skull cocked, jaws agape, as if ready to snatch up an onlooker. Christie’s was auctioning off Shen in November 2022, alongside works by Picasso, and it was expected to sell for $15 million to $25 million.

Dinosaur skeletons had recently become a hot new asset class, coveted by the ultrarich, not unlike sports franchises or Fabergé eggs. They offered a mix of glamour and primal appeal to a certain type of high-net-worth buyer — someone who might find the conventional art market fussy or convoluted but couldn’t deny the allure of a T. rex. “It could gobble you up in one bite. It’s just an amazing creature,” says billionaire Dan O’Dowd, who bought his T. rex, Samson, for a bargain $600,000 in 2009. “It’s the best trophy kind of thing you could own.”

Two years before the Shen auction, Christie’s had sold a T. rex named Stan, said to be one of the most complete and best-preserved specimens ever found, for $31.8 million, trouncing the top-end presale estimate of $8 million. And two years after the Shen auction, financier Ken Griffin spent $44.6 million on a stegosaurus (“a vegetarian,” O’Dowd notes). Leonardo DiCaprio, Nicolas Cage and other celebrities have gotten in on the dino game too.

Visitors look at the skeleton of a Tyrannosaurus Rex named Shen at the Victoria Theatre and Concert Hall in Singapore on Oct. 28, 2022. The skeleton is displayed in Singapore from Friday to Sunday, before being auctioned in China's Hong Kong. (Photo by Then Chih Wey/Xinhua via Getty Images) Photographer: Xinhua News Agency/Xinhua News Agency — Shen, which was set to auction at Christie’s for as much as $25 million, on display at the Victoria Theatre and Victoria Concert Hall in Singapore in 2022.

A dinosaur’s value, like a painting’s or sculpture’s, derives from a protean mix of provenance, desire and authenticity — the last one hard to define, let alone prove, and in the case of an auction, up to the buyer to verify. Christie’s marketing blitz for Shen included the claim that it was one of the most “scientifically studied T. rex skeletons to come to auction,” featuring it in a short promotional video in which the camera cinematically races in for tight shots of its menacing talons and gaping jaw as eerie electronic music pulses in the background. Christie’s made clear that the winning bidder would also get renaming rights, a tradition in which T. rexes in circulation are often given human names.

A month before Shen was supposed to arrive at Christie’s in Hong Kong, it was put on display at Singapore’s Victoria Theatre and Victoria Concert Hall, a stately neoclassical building with a grand clock tower. Families, tourists and prospective buyers in chauffeured Bentleys came to see the T. rex in the flesh, so to speak. But Shen never made it to the auction block.

The buzz for the sale had reached a scattered group of dinosaur enthusiasts around the world, and they’d been poring over the T. rex’s promotional photos online. Fewer than 30 T. rexes that are more than 30% intact have ever been identified, and people who track them get to know their skeletal features intimately. They’re able to recognize characteristics such as bumps on a fossil’s skull or the scars on their limbs. When five of these fossil connoisseurs — two paleontologists, two brokers and a collector, each in different countries — saw Shen, each felt a jolt of recognition. They were certain they’d seen elements of this T. rex before. It wasn’t exceptional. Most of it looked to them to be copies of that other T. rex, Stan. And whatever this assembled specimen was, they were certain of one thing: It wasn’t worth $15 million.

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Video: The $25 Million T. Rex Auction That Fell Apart

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