Maximus Rex needs a home. What Sotheby’s calls one of the most complete Tyrannosaurus rex skulls ever discovered goes on sale Dec. 9. The auction house expects it to command $15 million to $20 million.
Maximus hails from South Dakota and was excavated from the Hell Creek Formation, a trove of Cretaceous finds. The skull will be sold in a live auction, a suitably old-school send-off for a predator who bestrode the world 76 million years ago. But the skull, which weighs 150-plus pounds and measures about 4½ feet long, seems much more than just an objet. It isn’t precisely a work of art, and Maximus was once alive.
For billionaire collectors and deep-pocketed museums, Maximus’s $15 million to $20 million estimate may sound like a steal. In the first evening of Christie’s recent $1.6 billion two-day auction of art from Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen’s estate, five paintings, including works by Cézanne and van Gogh, sold for more than $100 million each. People had lined up around the block for hours to see them on exhibit at Christie’s in Rockefeller Center.
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Above all, the skull has gravitas, befitting anything that has hung around, relatively intact, for millions of years. The T-rex’s ferocious reputation aside, this fossil conveys a reassuring forbearance that this, too, shall pass.
