6. T. rex Skeletons

Summary

The Economics of Everyday Things – Episode 6: T. rex Skeletons

Host: Zachary Crockett (Freakonomics Radio Network)
Date: January 19, 2026

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Overview

This episode explores the fascinating and sometimes controversial world of Tyrannosaurus rex skeletons: how they’re found, who gets to own and sell them, and the surprising economic forces at play. Host Zachary Crockett digs into the business of dinosaur fossils—examining how discoveries have moved from academic, scientific pursuits into a lucrative marketplace, and what that shift means for museums, private collectors, scientists, and the public’s understanding of prehistoric life.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. The Auction That Shook the Fossil World

[00:57–02:01]

• In 2020, Christie’s auctioned a T. rex skeleton named Stan, which sold for nearly $32 million—five times its estimated price.
• This event spotlighted the astonishing market value of dinosaur fossils and the growing excitement (and anxiety) around their sales.

Quote:
“Stan was 25,000 person hours. That's a lot of work. And you know, somebody has to pay for that.”
—Peter Larson, [02:01]

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2. Where T. rexes Come From: Finding Dinosaurs

[02:10–03:23]

• Most T. rex fossils come from the Hell Creek Formation (Montana, Wyoming, Dakotas) and are roughly 66 million years old.
• Peter Larson and Dr. Thomas Carr explain that while some land is public (with strict fossil protections), much is private, leading to different rules.

Quote:
“The purpose of collecting fossils on public land is to collect them for science and education. At no point is contact made with the market.”
—Thomas Carr, Ph.D., [03:41]

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3. The Wild West of Private Fossil Hunting

[04:09–05:59]

• On private land, “it’s really a free for all,” says Dr. Carr. Fossils can be bought and sold by whoever finds them.
• Peter Larson and Clayton Phipps are key figures in this commercial fossil world. They negotiate splits with landowners (10–50% of value), invest heavily in excavation, and sometimes make or lose money on finds.

Quote:
“If a person finds a dinosaur, they can do whatever they want with it.”
—Thomas Carr, Ph.D., [04:13]

“We come up with a value based upon market prices... that can be anywhere from 10%... to as much as 50% if you've got a nice T. Rex skeleton on your Ground.”
—Peter Larson, [05:41]

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4. From Discovery to Dollars: The Business of Dinosaur Bones

[06:28–08:09]

• Excavation and preparation can take years and cost more than a million dollars.
• The value of a T. rex skeleton is primarily in its completeness and condition; full specimens are extremely rare.
• The “Sue” T. rex saga highlighted the legal and financial complexities—involving Native American land rights, federal agents, and a record-setting $8.4 million museum sale (with sponsors like McDonald’s and Disney).

Quote:
“No one has ever found a fully intact specimen. But Larson came close... They named it Sue. Sue came with some drama.”
—Zachary Crockett, [06:56]

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5. The Modern Fossil Hunters: Dreams and Disappointments

[08:34–10:09]

• The “Sue” sale inspired amateurs and professionals (“dinosaur dreamers”) to hunt for fossils as livelihood.
• Cowboy-turned-hunter Clayton Phipps shares his journey—selling a skull for “about a year’s wages,” struggling for years to sell a T. rex find.

Quote:
“If I had a dollar for every step I've ever taken looking for a dinosaur, or even probably a dime, I may be better off. Now I'm back to, yep, let's find another one.”
—Clayton Phipps, [13:07]

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6. The Challenge of Selling Fossils

[12:33–13:17]

• Even rare, spectacular fossils can be a hard sell; museums mostly buy, but they are often underfunded.
• Phipps sold his “Dueling Dinosaurs” fossil to the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences for $6 million after nearly two decades.

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7. Who Profits (and How): The Business of Fossil Replicas

[13:17–15:05]

• Peter Larson didn’t profit from Stan’s $32 million sale due to a family business dispute, but did retain intellectual property rights—and has built a major business selling museum-grade casts for $120,000 each.
• “There are Stans all over the place,” including museums in Japan, India, and private homes.
• The celebrity market: The Rock (Dwayne Johnson) has a plastic “Stan” skull.

Quote:
“No two people prepare a bone the same... It's all art. And so we have a registered copyright and we trademarked the name.”
—Peter Larson, [13:59]

“A Stan full mounted cast sells for $120,000... That's a bargain compared to, you know, $32 million.”
—Zachary Crockett & Peter Larson, [14:39–14:42]

“If you build a living room big enough to hold the dinosaur, that cost you way more than a dinosaur.”
—Nathan Myhrvold, [15:28]

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8. The Collector’s World: Billionaires & Dinosaur Dreams

[15:05–16:34]

• Collector Nathan Myhrvold (former CTO, Microsoft) recounts being part of an unusual club of private fossil owners—with the likes of Leonardo DiCaprio and Nicolas Cage.
• Myhrvold is unique in that he both funds scientific digs and collects fossils.

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9. The Impact on Science: An Existential Threat

[16:34–18:41]

• Myhrvold grants $500,000/year to research, supporting about 10 T. rex discoveries—helping public science compete.
• Dr. Carr and many paleontologists see private sales as a threat: over 60% of T. rex fossils are found and sold outside the public trust, which reduces sample sizes for research and means rare fossils (like Deinonychus) disappear into private homes.

Quote:
“Our natural heritage is just being auctioned off for top dollar. And that's a problem for science because to really understand nature... we have to have a high sample size.”
—Thomas Carr, Ph.D., [18:13]

“It took only 33 years for the commercial folks to collect more T Rexes than public Trust collected in 130 years. It's an existential threat.”
—Thomas Carr, Ph.D., [18:13]

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10. Commercial Hunters Respond

[19:07–19:32]

• Peter Larson counters: fossils left in the ground may be destroyed by erosion; commercial sales incentivize their recovery and fairly compensate landowners.

Quote:
“The scientists should be happy that these other fossils are being saved because you cannot leave a fossil in the ground and expect it to survive... I cannot fault someone for capitalizing an asset... especially farmers and ranchers. They need to be paid for these things.”
—Peter Larson, [19:07]

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11. The True Value of Dinosaur Bones

[19:32–end]

• For Carr, the ultimate value isn’t in the monetary figure but in discovery and knowledge: the lessons bones can teach about the past.

Quote:
“They may not be worth $32 million, but the real value, he says, is what they can teach us.”
—Zachary Crockett, summarizing Thomas Carr, [19:32]

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Notable Quotes & Moments

• On the thrill and agony of the market:
  “Sometimes you win and sometimes you lose. We've done projects where we've actually lost money on them just because we underestimate the amount of time it was going to take.”
  —Peter Larson, [06:46]

• On building a home for a T. rex skeleton:
  “If you build a living room big enough to hold the dinosaur, that cost you way more than a dinosaur.”
  —Nathan Myhrvold, [15:28]

• On the intersection of science and commerce:
  “Our natural heritage is just being auctioned off for top dollar.”
  —Thomas Carr, Ph.D., [18:13]

---

Timestamps for Key Segments

• Auction and Stan’s record price: [00:57–02:01]
• Science vs. Commerce on public vs. private land: [03:23–04:25]
• Life as a commercial fossil hunter: [04:45–07:00]
• The saga of Sue and legal tussles: [07:00–08:34]
• Dinosaur hunting as livelihood (Phipps): [08:42–10:09]
• The replica business and celebrity ownership: [13:59–15:28]
• The impact on science and ethics in paleontology: [16:34–19:32]

---

Closing Tone

The episode blends humor, curiosity, and admiration for both the business and science of dinosaur fossils. It spotlights quirky personalities, bitter courtroom dramas, and the wonders that lie underground—while leaving listeners to ponder the future of our priceless prehistoric heritage.

---

Memorable Closing

“How many times do you get to meet the world’s foremost expert on dinosaur vomit?”
—Nathan Myhrvold, [20:21]

Transcript

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[Zachary Crockett (Narrator/Host)]

In October of 2020, there was a hotly anticipated auction at Christie's in New York City. It included paintings from some of history's most venerated artists. Picasso, Rothko, Cezanne. But the lot that fetched the highest price was not a painting.

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Lot number 59.

[Nathan Myhrvold]

Really?

[Commercial Advertiser Voice]

27?

[Nathan Myhrvold]

Yes, really.

[Peter Larson]

Sorry.

[Thomas Carr, Ph.D.]

27.

[Zachary Crockett (Narrator/Host)]

One, please.

[Commercial Advertiser Voice]

We're all waiting with bated breath. $27,100,000.

[Zachary Crockett (Narrator/Host)]

$27,500, please.

[Commercial Advertiser Voice]

We've come this far. Okay, $27,500,000. Fair warning. I am happy to sell this. And sold. Thank you very much.

[Zachary Crockett (Narrator/Host)]

The object on the block, a Tyrannosaurus rex skeleton named Stan. With fees, it went for just under $32 million, more than five times its minimum estimated sale price. For the man who helped discover Stan, it was validation of a job well done.

[Peter Larson]

Stan was 25,000 person hours. That's a lot of work. And you know, somebody has to pay for that.

[Zachary Crockett (Narrator/Host)]

For the Freakonomics Radio Network, this is the economics of everyday things. I'm Zachary Crockett. Today, T. Rex skeletons. You've probably seen a T. Rex, or at least part of one, at a natural history museum. So how did it get there? Well, if you want to find one in the ground, your best bet is to head to the Hell Creek Formation, a stretch of rock that runs through Montana, Wyoming and the Dakotas. It dates back to the Cretaceous age, which ended around 66 million years ago. The first documented T. Rex discovery was made in the Hell Creek formation in 1902. And nearly all of the T. Rex excavated since then, that's around 140 of them were also found there. A lot of that land is publicly owned. And here in the United States, fossils on public land are protected by law. You need permission from the Bureau of Land Management to conduct searches. In most cases, you also have to be a credentialed scientist, someone like Thomas.

[Thomas Carr, Ph.D.]

Carr, Ph.D. director of the Carthage Institute of Paleontology. I study the growth and evolution of Tyrannosaurus rex and its closest relatives.

[Zachary Crockett (Narrator/Host)]

Carr is one of the country's foremost experts on Tyrannosaurus rex, and he is not in it for the money.

[Thomas Carr, Ph.D.]

The purpose of collecting fossils on public land is to collect them for science and education. At no point is contact made with the market. You know, it would just defeat the purpose entirely.

[Zachary Crockett (Narrator/Host)]

When you find fossils on public land, you're not allowed to sell them once.

[Thomas Carr, Ph.D.]

They'Re out of the ground. They have to go into a public trust. At the end of each year, we are responsible for submitting a field report, which includes a catalog of all the fossils that we found.

[Zachary Crockett (Narrator/Host)]

But a fossil found on private land, that's a different story.

[Thomas Carr, Ph.D.]

It's really a free for all on private land. If a person finds a dinosaur, they can do whatever they want with it.

[Zachary Crockett (Narrator/Host)]

That includes selling it on the open market. At annual gatherings like the Tucson Gem and Mineral show, you'll find dozens of fossil hunters selling things like Spinosaurus teeth and bone fragments of Triceratops. If you ask around, it won't be long before you come across this guy.

[Peter Larson]

My name is Peter Larson. I'm president of Black Hills Institute of Geological Research in Hill City, South Dakota, the place where museums go to shop for such strange things as dinosaur skeletons.

[Zachary Crockett (Narrator/Host)]

Larson started out in the 70s selling small fossils at trade shows. One day, that all changed.

[Peter Larson]

We were approached by a museum that said, can you get us a dinosaur skeleton? And although I'd never found a dinosaur skeleton, I said, sure, of course we can.

[Zachary Crockett (Narrator/Host)]

He ended up finding that dinosaur, and then he found a hell of a lot more of them, Specifically T. Rex skeletons we've collected.

[Peter Larson]

Now I think we're at number 13. That's quite a few.

[Zachary Crockett (Narrator/Host)]

When Larson wants to go look for dinosaur bones, the first thing he has to do is get permission to conduct a search on private land. This involves cutting the ranch owner in on any future discoveries.

[Peter Larson]

We come up with a value based upon market prices at the time. That can be anywhere from 10% of something that's hard to sell to as much as 50% if you've got a nice T. Rex skeleton on your Ground.

[Zachary Crockett (Narrator/Host)]

Fossil scouting isn't as romantic as it sounds. Larson walks around for months over craggy terrain, his eye trained to the ground for the faintest bone fragments. Many times he won't find anything at all. When he does find evidence of a skeleton, he begins a lengthy and extremely intensive excavation process. From start to finish, getting a dinosaur fossil out of the ground and into a buyer's hands can take two to three years.

[Peter Larson]

So let's say it's a T Rex skeleton, it's a 40 foot long skeleton. You're having an investment of in excess of a million dollars to get that ready for exhibit.

[Zachary Crockett (Narrator/Host)]

Larson will strike a deal with a potential buyer before the fossil is removed, so he has to approximate his overhead costs in advance.

[Peter Larson]

Sometimes you win and sometimes you lose. We've done projects where we've actually lost money on them just because we underestimate the amount of time it was going to take.

[Zachary Crockett (Narrator/Host)]

When everything goes smoothly, he nets a profit of around 20% of the sale price of the skeleton. Now, what a fossil commands on the market depends on a few its size, its condition, and most importantly, its completeness. There are around 380 bones in a T Rex skeleton. No one has ever found a fully intact specimen. But Larson came close. On a scorching summer day in 1990, just outside the City of Faith, South Dakota, Larson and his team uncovered the most complete T rex skeleton in history. 90% by bone volume. They named it Sioux sue. Came with some drama. After the excavation, it came out that the fossil had actually been found on land that was part of the Cheyenne River Indian Reservation. Federal agents seized it and a legal battle broke out. In the end, the landowner, a man named Morris Williams, who was a member of the Sioux tribe, was awarded full ownership, and he took the dinosaur straight to auction.

[Peter Larson]

Up to that point, no fossil had been sold for a million dollars. All of a sudden, it went to 2 million to 3 million to 4 million to 5 million to 7 million.

[Zachary Crockett (Narrator/Host)]

Sue sold for around $8.4 million to the field Museum in Chicago, with financing from corporate sponsors like McDonald's and the Walt Disney Company. It was the start of a new age in the market for dinosaur fossils.

[Peter Larson]

Everybody said, huh? These fossils could be worth a lot of money. It brought a number of what I call dinosaur dreamers into the business.

[Clayton Phipps]

Clayton Fish, I'm Clayton Phipps and some folks call me the Dinosaur Cowboy. Before I became a fossil hunter, I really was a cowboy. That's all I'd ever really done.

[Zachary Crockett (Narrator/Host)]

Phipps grew up on a ranch in remote Montana. His family were homesteaders going back generations, scraping a living off the land. But around the time sue was discovered, he realized he might be sitting on a gold mine.

[Clayton Phipps]

A kid came by and asked if he could look for fossils, and it was right after the movie Jurassic park came out that the dinosaur craze was high. And it just really piqued my interest and I started spending every free minute I had learning what I could about dinosaurs.

[Zachary Crockett (Narrator/Host)]

In 2003, he nabbed his first big find, the skull of a stygy Moloch, a rare horned dinosaur that roamed the North American plains around 70 million years ago.

[Clayton Phipps]

I ended up selling that. It gave me about a year's wages as to what I was making as a cowboy to see if I could maybe quit my job and make fossil hunting more of a way to earn a living for my family. And I had to go out and find something or we didn't get to buy groceries.

[Zachary Crockett (Narrator/Host)]

A few years later, on a neighboring ranch, Phipps stumbled across the discovery of a lifetime. The remains of a young T. Rex and a triceratops entangled in a deadly brawl. Which raised a How exactly does an amateur paleontologist get a 20 ton fossil out of the ground?

[Clayton Phipps]

There were no YouTube videos out there on how to do it at that time, so we started out.

[Zachary Crockett (Narrator/Host)]

With some rancher ingenuity, Phipps dug around the massive fossil, slipped a pallet underneath it, and dragged it down the road with a tractor trailer. While the excavation method was less than scientific, the fossil itself was one of a kind. But in the dinosaur market, even the best fossils can be hard to sell. And that's because finding a buyer can be almost as hard as finding a dinosaur. That's coming up. The Economics of Everyday Things is sponsored by crowdstreet. You're the kind of person who reads the fine print, who likes to make your own calls, who's built a life, not to mention a career, by thinking independently. So why shouldn't you invest that way too? Crowdstreet is built for self directed investors who want direct access to private market opportunities like private equity, private credit and real estate. Vetted offerings, transparent data and clear diligence summaries help you make confident, informed choices. Because independence doesn't stop at your desk or your business or your weekend projects, it should extend to your investments too. Invest the way you live independently. Learn [e-mail].

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[Zachary Crockett (Narrator/Host)]

With a rare dinosaur fossil in hand, Clayton Phipps thought he'd have an easy sell.

[Clayton Phipps]

We went to most of the major museums in the US and some overseas museums and tried to get somebody interested and, you know, it kept me broke for years.

[Zachary Crockett (Narrator/Host)]

Phipps spent nearly two decades trying to sell his prized fossil. In 2020, he finally secured a buyer. The North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences bought it for $6 million after paying off the landowner and accounting for expenses. Phipps says the deal didn't make him as rich as he'd hoped.

[Clayton Phipps]

If I had a dollar for every step I've ever taken looking for a dinosaur, or even probably a dime, I may be better off. Now I'm back to, yep, let's find another one.

[Zachary Crockett (Narrator/Host)]

Peter Larson, our other fossil hunter, knows better than anyone that a big sale doesn't always result in a big payday. Remember Stan the dinosaur that fetched $31.8 million at Christie's? It ended up in Abu Dhabi, where it will be the star of a new museum in a few years. Larson didn't see a penny from that sale. In the years leading up to the auction, he had a dispute with his brother over the ownership of their company. They agreed on an unorthodox settlement. His brother got Stan's bones, he kept the firm, but he did get to keep the intellectual property rights to Stan.

[Peter Larson]

No two people prepare a bone the same. And, you know, there's the artistry where you reconstruct, where you're putting the pieces back together, where you're creating the parts that are missing. It's all art. And so we have a registered copyright and we trademarked the name.

[Zachary Crockett (Narrator/Host)]

Stan Larson's company now makes extremely accurate plastic casts of Stan right down to the serrations in the teeth. Those casts have become his bread and butter.

[Peter Larson]

A Stan full mounted cast sells for $120,000. And then that's plus whatever shipping and crating that would have to go in that.

[Zachary Crockett (Narrator/Host)]

That's a bargain compared to, you know, $32 million.

[Peter Larson]

Yeah, that's right. Not everyone can afford a cast a stand, but a lot more people can than afford an original stand skeleton.

[Zachary Crockett (Narrator/Host)]

Larson says he has sold around 100 casts to museums all over the world. There are stands in Washington D.C. korea.

[Peter Larson]

Japan, India, France, Spain, Germany, England. Stands all over the place.

[Zachary Crockett (Narrator/Host)]

There are even a few stands floating around in private homes. Dwayne the Rock Johnson has a plastic stand skull in his home office. It set him back around 12,000 bucks. And if you take a boat down Lake Washington in Seattle and you peer into the glass atrium of one of those waterfront mansions, you might catch a glimpse of a full scale Stan skeleton.

[Nathan Myhrvold]

People will say, well, how much did your cast cost? Like they want to see how much money I blew on that. And I said, look, the truth of it is if you build a living room big enough to hold the dinosaur, that cost you way more than a dinosaur.

[Zachary Crockett (Narrator/Host)]

That's Nathan Myhrvold. He was the first CTO at Microsoft. He's the founder of a private equity firm called Intellectual Ventures. And as it happens, he's also very into dinosaurs.

[Nathan Myhrvold]

Oh yeah, I've got. So Archaeopteryx is a very famous fossil. I have a Megalodon jaw. I have an ancient fish called Xiphactinus, which is a fish that used to live in the inland sea.

[Zachary Crockett (Narrator/Host)]

Outside of museums, there aren't many people willing to shell out big bucks for dinosaur fossils, but Myhrwald is one of them.

[Nathan Myhrvold]

The Wall Street Journal did an article on people collecting fossils a number of years ago, and at that point in time they had identified three private individuals in the United States. And it was very funny because it was Leonardo DiCaprio, Nicholas Cage and me.

[Zachary Crockett (Narrator/Host)]

But Myhrwald isn't just a collector of fossils. He, he's accompanied paleontologists on digs, he's written a number of peer reviewed papers, including one on dinosaur vomit. And he's played a critical role in funding scientific expeditions which are chronically under.

[Nathan Myhrvold]

Resourced a huge amount of paleontology. It's people spending $20,000 a year to take a few of their students on a camping trip for a couple of weeks in one place. One of the bigger line items, renting porta potties for the campground.

[Zachary Crockett (Narrator/Host)]

For the past two decades, Myhrvault has granted around $500,000 per year to paleontologists. Those grants have resulted in at least 10 T Rex discoveries, all on public land for academic research. It's an effort to level the playing field for scientists who simply can't compete with the budgets of commercial fossil hunters. Thomas Carr, the paleontology professor in Wisconsin, says that the commercial market for dinosaurs has had a devastating impact on scientific research. He and many other paleontologists adhere to a code of ethics established by the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology. That code says that they can only study fossils in the public trust. Anything sold on the open market is strictly off limits. And that's a problem because to date, more than 60% of all known T Rex fossils have been found by commercial fossil hunters.

[Thomas Carr, Ph.D.]

It took only 33 years for the commercial folks to collect more T Rexes than public Trust collected in 130 years. It's an existential threat. Our natural heritage is just being auctioned off for top dollar. And that's a problem for science because to really understand nature, particularly organisms, we have to have a high sample size.

[Zachary Crockett (Narrator/Host)]

This problem is not exclusive to T Rex fossils.

[Thomas Carr, Ph.D.]

Triceratops shows up on the market Duck billed dinosaurs. In the past year, a very rare example of a bird like dinosaur called Deinonychus was auctioned to a private individual. And Deinonychus is known from very few specimens. Like there's only six or seven good ones is gone and there's nothing we can do about it.

[Zachary Crockett (Narrator/Host)]

Commercial fossil hunters like Larson see it differently.

[Peter Larson]

The scientists should be happy that these other fossils are being saved because you cannot leave a fossil in the ground and expect it to survive. I cannot fault someone for capitalizing an asset that they might have, and especially farmers and ranchers. They need to be paid for these things.

[Zachary Crockett (Narrator/Host)]

Last summer, after many fruitless searches, paleontologist Thomas Carr finally found something that had been eluding him for years. Bone fragments from a rare juvenile T Rex. They may not be worth $32 million, but the real value, he says, is what they can teach us about the inhabitants of the Cretaceous era. He hopes to return next year to look for a full skeleton. That is, unless someone else gets there first. For the economics of everyday things, I'm Zachary Crockett. This episode was produced by Sarah Lilly with help from Lyric Bowditch and mixed by Jeremy Johnston.

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I mean, right? It's truly an honor. The Freakonomics Radio Network the hidden side of everything.

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