Reported by BBC Science
The mounted skeleton of a newly-identified dinosaur once mistaken for a young Tyrannosaurus rex has sold at auction for a colossal $47.3m (£35.5m).
Nicknamed Jodi, the roughly 10-foot-tall (3m) skeleton was auctioned by Sotheby's in New York. The sale comes a year after researchers confirmed that the skeleton belongs to a distinct genus.
The Late Cretaceous carnivore was expected to fetch at least $9m when it went under the hammer on Tuesday. The auction comes after Sotheby's sold a Tyrannosaurus rex, dubbed Gus, for a record $50.1m in July.
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The sale has reignited debate in the scientific community over whether dinosaur remains should be sold privately or displayed publicly.
Sotheby's described Jodi as an "excellent exhibition-ready" skeleton with about 191 fossil-bone elements and a "beautifully preserved, virtually complete skull".
The auction house added that the Nanotyrannus is "one of only three such skeletons known to science". The specimen is the first to come to market since the existence of the genus was confirmed by US researchers last October, Sotheby's said.
The identify of the buyer, who won after a thrilling 12 minutes of auction bidding between six interested parties, has not been disclosed.
It becomes the second-most valuable dinosaur fossil ever sold, behind Gus. The third-most valuable was a Stegosaurus named Apex, which was sold by Sotheby's in July 2024 for $44.6m.
Megan Jacobs, a palaeontologist at the University of Portsmouth, told BBC Radio 4's Today programme on Tuesday that Nanotyrannus "was for a very long time believed to be sort of a teenager of T. rex".
"But it's a lot smaller and its a lot more gracile. So it's very sort-of sleek, slender, [with] blade-like teeth for slicing through meat," Jacobs said.
Tyrannosaurus rex and Nanotyrannus lived alongside one another during the same geological period approximately 67 million years ago.
Jodi was initially exhibited as a juvenile T. rex at London's Frieze Masters international art fair in October 2023, before the Nanotyrannus genus was classified.
The skeleton was discovered in the US state of Montana by rancher Jodi Pierson on her land in the Hell Creek Formation, a heavily…