Auctions throw up some strange lots sometimes, as these days it seems anything and everything can be sold as long as it's worthy of value.
Yesterday, June 12, was one such event, as a large collection of items including dinosaur skeletons and meteorites went on sale at Heritage Auctions in Dallas, US.
The highlight was undoubtedly an incredible 'fighting' pair of dinosaurs which were snapped up by a museum for $2.75m. Along with those, a complete 19-foot-long triceratops skeleton was auctioned off for $657,250 to a private collector. Not a bad price for a collection of bones.
The overall auction consisted of more than 200 items, including other fossils, meteorites and minerals.
Even though such items may be unlike other 'traditional' investments, they will always be sought after by Museums and are therefore valuable. And auctions like this show that it's not only private collectors who win the best items, as museums are just as likely to get involved...
 Dinosaur skeletons starred in Heritage's unusual auction |
The rarity and the interest that comes with natural history objects, like skeletons, means they will almost always be sold for high prices. After all, imagine having a 19-foot triceratops in your living room.
Fighting investments...
The so-called fighting dinosaurs, an allosaurus and stegosaurus, were found in a quarry in the state of Wyoming; apparently with the allosaurus biting the leg of the herbivore in a predator-prey battle at the time of their death.
The museum which bought the dinosaurs this time was not named, though it was said to be outside America.
The reason for the sale, according to palaeontologist Henry Galiano, was to raise money to help with future research and expeditions to find more specimens.
While impressive, this sale of skeletons does not come close to other previous ones, like that of Sue, a Tyrannosaurs Rex, in 1997. She was sold for $8.3m to the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago.
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