The Nanotyrannus skeleton nicknamed Jodi sold for $47.3 million (about £35.5 million) at Sotheby’s in New York on October 27, 2026.
The price was more than five times the auction house’s pre-sale estimate of at least $9 million, and it came after 12 minutes of bidding among six parties. The buyer has not been named. Jodi is now the second most valuable dinosaur fossil ever sold, behind the Tyrannosaurus rex Gus, which Sotheby’s sold for a record $50.1 million in July 2026, and ahead of the Stegosaurus Apex at $44.6 million in July 2024. The roughly 10-foot-tall (3 m) skeleton has about 191 fossil bone elements and a nearly complete skull. It was found on rancher Jodi Pierson’s land in Montana’s Hell Creek Formation and was once shown as a juvenile T. rex, before research by Lindsay Zanno and James Napoli confirmed in 2025 that Nanotyrannus is a separate genus. Sotheby’s says it is one of only three such skeletons known, and some palaeontologists worry it may now be kept out of public view.
Source: BBC News, “Nanotyrannus skeleton sells for $47.3m in New York auction” (October 27, 2026)
Image: Nanotyrannus mount at the Cleveland Museum of Natural History, shown for illustration (not the auctioned specimen). Photo by ScottRobertAnselmo, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.