Bye Old Masters, Hello Dinosaurs

FORGET THE OLD MASTERS, LONG LIVE THE DINOSAURS Many collectors have started to move away from the old masters. They are increasingly interested in the skeletons of animals that populated the earth a few million years ago, as demonstrated by several sales that have attracted Hollywood celebrities like Leonardo Di Caprio, Nicolas Cage, or Russell Crowe. The fashion is now to have your dinosaur in your living room, like the skeleton of an unidentified specimen 8.7 meters long sold for 2 million euros by the Aguttes group, while Christie's and Sotheby's have also started the part in the field of prehistory. In short, a TRex skeleton is very decorative. At the same time, collectors are often unaware that these animal relics, rarely complete, had to be patiently reconstructed and restored by paleontologists who are in fact real works of art. We now see them in art fairs such as BRAFA in Brussels or Art Miami where Leonardo Di Caprio was said to have been interested in the skeleton of a 120 million-year-old allosaurus proposed at $ 2.5 million. The most sought-after specimens have been the allosaurus, diplodocus, triceratops, velociraptor, featured in the movie Jurassic Park , and the dreaded TRex, which is worth between $3 and $10 million. These skeletons are rare, the prices reached since the release of Jurassic Park in 1993 and that of the Lost World four years later, while the record set at auction concerned that of a T-Rex sold by Sotheby's 8.36 million dollars for the Field Museum in Chicago. The problem is that some of the relics offered on the market come from illegal excavations, such as the dinosaur skull found in Mongolia that Nicolas Cage bought for $276,000 before being forced to return it as more and more paleontologists claim the ban on their sales. On the other hand, the world of buyers remains disparate, not to mention that they generally only buy a skeleton in their lifetime. Nevertheless, demand tends to increase, and prices will therefore continue to rise.
Old article from 2019: Journal d'un Fou d'art, written by my late friend Adrian Darmon
Video about one of the best preserved skeletons: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hgO0qBsCaZc