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 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.
Museum paleontologists will soon study one of the animal’s large femurs to better understand its growth, and create a three-dimensional scan of the dinosaur. Since Apex is a mature individual, the slice of femur the team investigates will be especially helpful in producing a growth curve of the stegosaurus. Recent studies suggest that stegosaurus may have had a slower metabolic rate than other dinosaurs, which makes the animal’s age and rate of growth all the more useful. Animals with slower metabolic rates tend to grow slower than others, and upcoming analysis of Apex’s bone could provide the best look yet at stegosaurus.
Though the team doesn’t know much about what happened to Apex in life—again, they’ve yet to properly investigate the animal—one detail of what happened to the animal in death is on full display. Just below the animal’s scapula—its shoulder blade—a small puncture mark in Apex’s coracoid has a bit of bone in it. That bone is actually the tip of a chevron, one of the spikes that makes up the stegosaurus’s thagomizer. The thagomizer is the end of the stegosaurus’s tail, intimidatingly covered in spikes called chevrons, and named after a Gary Larson strip.
“In death,” Benson said, “the stegosaurus was more or less curled around itself.” Apex’s chevron impaled the animal’s left shoulder, and a bit of the bone snapped off and stayed put. With the exception of that self-incurred wound, Apex is in good shape.
“It was buried relatively quickly, and for whatever reason the skeleton wasn’t disturbed extensively by scavengers,” Benson said. “That is to say, sometimes you just get lucky.”
The public can appreciate the 150-million-year-old behemoth beginning Sunday, December 9. It’s not clear where Apex will go after its four-year tenure at the museum—that remains up to Ken Griffin.
