[Rockhounds] Hedge Fund Billionaire Brings $44.6M Jurassic Giant to American Museum of Natural History

[Kreigh Tomaszewski]

New stegosaurus just dropped—not literally, thank gosh, as that’d be a
$44.6 million disaster.

The stegosaurus is dubbed Apex. It was found near Dinosaur, Colorado, in
2022 and was bought for that record price
<https://gizmodo.com/stegosaurus-fossil-sells-to-hedge-fund-billionaire-for-record-breaking-45-million-2000476399>
by
hedge fund billionaire Ken Griffin this July. (Griffin’s name is also on
the atrium of the museum’s splashy new Gilder Center for Science,
Education, and Innovation.) Now, the 150-million-year-old fossil will begin
a four-year stay at the American Museum of Natural History, where
paleontologists will be able to investigate the animal to better understand
the iconic Jurassic herbivore.

Some facts about the privately owned dino: Apex is 11 feet tall and 27 feet
long (3 meters tall, 8 m long), making it one of the largest and most
complete stegosaurs ever found. Apex is temporarily on view on the first
floor of the Gilder Center, though the hulking herbivore will eventually be
moved into the museum’s fourth floor dinosaur hall. There were three
stegosaurus species that roamed what is now western North America in the
late Jurassic, and it’s not yet clear to which species Apex belonged.

“One of the things we want to do is understand changes to the structure of
the skeleton through growth of the animal,” Roger Benson, a paleontologist
at the American Museum of Natural History and the museum’s
curator-in-charge of fossil amphibians, reptiles, and birds and fossil
plants, told Gizmodo at a press preview of the fossil.

https://gizmodo.com/hedge-fund-billionaire-brings-44-6m-jurassic-giant-to-american-museum-of-natural-history-2000534920