On 6 October 2020, a mysterious buyer paid a record-breaking $31.8m for the famous Tyrannosaurus rex skeleton known as Stan.
The rare, mostly complete skeleton of the dinosaur quickly vanished from the public eye. Paleontologists were left worried that the auction sale to a secret buyer would drive up the cost of rare skeletons, price out smaller museums and deny researchers – and the public – access to them.
One and a half years later, the buyer has finally been unmasked. Using American trade records, National Geographic magazine tracked the 5.6-ton shipment in May 2021 from New York to the United Arab Emirates.
The mystery was solved: Stan was headed to Abu Dhabi, to be put on display in the city’s future natural history museum, a 377,000 sq ft project under construction on Saadiyat Island, an upscale arts district in the capital.
The Natural History Museum Abu Dhabi, slated for completion in 2025, will “feature some of the rarest wonders of natural history ever found”, according to a press release from Abu Dhabi’s department of culture and tourism. The museum told National Geographic that it would build and run a research facility with a focus on zoology, paleontology, marine biology, earth sciences and molecular research.
In addition to the 39ft-long and 67-million-year-old skeleton, the museum will also feature a fragment of the Murchison meteorite, a carbon-rich meteorite that disintegrated in 1969 above Australia. Containing organic “stardust” compounds as well as seven-billion-year-old presolar grains that formed before the sun, the meteorite has fascinated researchers for decades.
In a statement, Mohamed Khalifa al Mubarak, the chair of Abu Dhabi’s culture and tourism department, said, “Natural history has a new home here in Abu Dhabi, and we will tell the story of our universe through some of the most incredible specimens known to mankind.”
“These are rare gifts from nature that we are proud to protect and share with the world,” he added.
As one of the world’s most famous and extensively studied skeletons, Stan was dug up in 1992 on private land in South Dakota. For more than 20 years, the fossil was protected and studied at the private Black Hills Institute of Geological Research in South Dakota.
Over the years, Black Hills Institute made hundreds of replicas of Stan that were displayed globally in museums and in the homes of celebrities, including that of actor Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson.
However, after a legal conflict between brothers Pete and Neal Larson, two of the institute’s largest shareholders, a judge ordered Stan’s sale in 2018, prompting the most expensive auction for a fossil of any creature at Christie’s New York.
After the famous skeleton disappeared into the hands of its private buyer, paleontologists grew concerned that the hefty price tag would further drive the illegal fossil trade and prevent museums with smaller budgets from obtaining specimens for research and display.
Others, according to National Geographic, worried that Stan’s auction could increasingly limit research on private land in the US if more landowners choose to publicly sell fossils.
However, upon hearing the announcement of Stan’s new home, many paleontologists were relieved. Lindsay Zanno, a paleontologist at the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences, told National Geographic, “If Stan can inspire a new generation to protect the past and lean into conserving our planet’s biodiversity in the future, that’s what I call a happy ending.”
David Evans, a paleontologist at Toronto’s Royal Ontario Museum, said that if Stan is a permanent part of the Abu Dhabi museum’s collection and not just a temporary loan from a private collector, then his skeleton could “grow scientific interest in dinosaurs in a part of the world that has big potential for new fossil discoveries”.
