The highest auction sale this July — and one of the highest all year — was not of a work of art but rather a nearly complete fossil skeleton of a Stegosaurus, named “Apex.” The mounted dinosaur fossil fetched $44.6 million at Sotheby’s, New York on July 17, setting a record, by far, for a fossil sold at auction; the previous record was $31.8 million for the T-Rex skeleton, “Stan” at Christie’s, NY in 2020.

The buyer of “Apex” was financier Ken Griffin, who is well known for collecting at the top of the art market, e.g. his 2015 purchase of Willem de Kooning’s Interchange (1955) for a reported $300 million remains the highest known private sale nearly ten years later — and the second-highest known sale of a work of art in any market, after only the sale of the Salvator Mundi for $450 million at Christie’s, NY in 2017.

Griffin, however, has been showing himself to be cross-sector trophy collector, making other notable purchases at the highest echelons of the non-art market. The purchase price of “Apex” was slightly more than his purchase price of $43.2 million for a rare copy of the US Constitution at Sotheby’s, NY in 2021, edging out a crypto-invetor consortium of 17,0000 people, ConstitutionDAO.

Detail of constitution purchased by Ken Griffin at Sotheby’s

But how do such high prices for non-art items stack up with the art market?

The price paid for “Apex” is just under the price of $46.5 million for Basquiat’s Untitled (“ELMAR") at Phillips, NY, which led a season lacking in stratospheric art consignments. This was a mid-range Basquiat, selling for about half the $100M+ price that Griffin reportedly paid in 2020 for Basquiat’s Boy and Dog in a Johnnypump (1982), and less than a quarter of the $200M price that Griffin reportedly paid for Maezawa’s untitled Basquiat head this year, flipped from his $110.5 million purchase at Sotheby’s, NY in 2017.

Jean-Michel Basquiat, *Untitled (ELMAR)*, 1982

As another point of comparison, Rothko’s Untitled (Yellow, Orange, Yellow, Light Orange) (1955) sold for $46.4 million at Christie’s, NY, in November 2023, slightly over half the artist’s record of $86.9 million set back in 2012 and about a quarter of the highest price reportedly paid for a Rothko, namely the private sale of No. 6 (Violet, Green and Red) for $186 million in 2014.

Realizing almost exactly the same price as “Apex” was Kandinsky’s record-setting Murnau with Church II (1910), which sold for $44.7 million at Sotheby’s London in March 2023. Diebenkorn’s auction record was set with the sale of Recollections of a Visit to Leningrad (1965) for $46.4 million at Christie’s, NY in November 2023, and Henri Rousseau’s auction record was set with the sale of Les Filaments (1910) at Christie’s, NY in May 2023.