Dinosaurs — When a yacht won’t cut it
My neighbor, a white retired Swiss man, said he just waltzed past security and into Zurich’s Tonhalle, where the T-Rex Trinity was on display to the general public. This was before it went under the hammer on April 18th with Koller at the “Out of This World” auction. I realized my worry about not having a ticket to this free, but sold-out viewing was misplaced. It revealed an all too common dynamic: foreign residents being more concerned with rules than their Swiss counterparts. On a rainy afternoon, I made my way past the banks of Paradeplatz, past the glitzy stores of Bahnhofstrasse and straight into the great music hall on the banks of Lake Zurich. The entrance was teeming with some serious stroller traffic. A Swiss mother had an extra ticket and kindly offered to let me have it, me robbed of the opportunity to break the rules after all.
I felt excited climbing the staircase to the 1930s foyer where Trinity was on display. Stepping into her presence, I had the familiar feeling of gazing up into the vaulted ceilings of a Gothic cathedral, but instead of architecture invoking the awe of divinity, I had Trinity. Her enormous skull and ferocious jaw paused in a roar. This must have been the last thing creatures eaten by her saw before being devoured. I don’t think the set-up was meant to be humorous, but I took it as such.
It also didn’t help that Trinity’s skeleton was traipsing down a literal red carpet, swarmed in spotlights and — on this day — toddlers in rain gear, forgetting to look up. The soundtrack to Hollywood blockbusters played over loudspeakers, Trinity’s tail extended to keep her in balance, like any starlet in stilettos. Was this what the Koller auction house (whose name amusingly means “rage”) meant when their catalog described Trinity as mounted in a truly “modern pose”? They’d propped her up like a luxury handbag in a Bahnhofstrasse storefront.
If we’re going to get down to the bare bones of it (no pun intended), scarcity is what drives the luxury market. I can see how it make would strategic sense to market Trinity as luxury merchandise. After all, only 32 Tyrannosaurus Rex skeletons have been recovered to date — and only 3 have ever gone to auction. So, when an undisclosed U.S. collector contacted Christian Link, a Zurich magician turned curiosities dealer, to sell his T-Rex, Link jumped at the chance. The collector even offered Link the rare opportunity of naming the specimen. And so we have Trinity, not one skeleton, but a composite of three from separate dig sites in Montana and Wyoming. A Frankensaur, if you will.
Dinosaur bones have become a solid investment, with market prices on a steady rise. Koller was anxious to get it right and its catalog, in addition to some truly gorgeous portraits of Trinity by Oliver Nanzig (one of which is shown here), promised the new owner GPS dig site coordinates, detailed composite maps and field photos. They wanted to exhaustively back-up Trinity’s advertised selling points, a level of scrutiny made necessary by recent scandals in the dinosaur market. (And, yes, let’s pause for a moment at the term “dinosaur market”.) Last November, Christie’s Hong Kong had to pull a specimen from auction when its skull was suspected of being an undisclosed copy of Stan, another famous T-Rex skeleton. So, Koller was careful. It was precise about boasting that Trinity has 50.17% original bone material, making it “museum quality” according to the parameters of the palaeontologic world. (A lot of material reinforcement and restoration is necessary when dealing with fossils.) Although Trinity was expected to go for anywhere between five to eight million Swiss francs, the catalog offered an optimistic little nudge reminding bidders that Stan had an “estimated overall completeness of 65%” and sold with Christie’s in October 2020 for 31.8 million US dollars — just saying.
Koller also emphasized that Stan would be making his home at the Abu Dhabi Museum of Natural History when it opens in 2025, which brings us to another tricky topic. When it comes to dinosaurs, you not only have to worry about provenance but also destination. The issue of provenance can be a sore spot for cultural institutions (and something that Switzerland’s neutrality has perhaps unwittingly abetted). But, in the end, who should get to own a T-Rex skeleton, given how few and scientifically important they are?
It is telling that this auction landed in the lap of Link with his expertise in curiosities. Cabinets of curiosities, also called Wunderkammer, started in the Italian Renaissance as an antidote to the boredom of the aristocracy. Translated into our times, this could look like oligarchs and tycoons buying up rare, expensive creatures of general scientific interest to privately admire and brag about in shouted whispers. Link hopes Trinity will end up in a museum, but the free market game he is playing with Koller offers up no such assurances. Link would most likely benefit from the high prices that would keep a specimen like Trinity out of public hands, given it is fair to assume he will be paid a commission calculated on Trinity’s final price and so benefits from her going to the highest bidder. But others argue that the issue of destination is, in the long run, a moot point. Dr. Dennis Hansen, Project Leader at the Natural History Museum of the University of Zurich, says “If we have to wait two or three generations for a private collector or their grandchildren to donate it (the dinosaur skeleton) to a museum, that’s fine. I mean, the dinosaur is already 65, 66 million years old. What’s a few human generations between friends?”
Trinity’s auction was held yesterday at the Koller showrooms. The tone was more serious than the display at Tonhalle. Serious money was involved this time around, although there was an air of casual wealth about the whole thing (messy hair and fancy watches; not looking anyone in the eye). The bidding for Trinity was preceded by an enthusiastic fundraising bid for the Saurier Museum Aathal, the local dinosaur museum that assisted Koller with the technical handling of the T-Rex. Then came Trinity’s big moment. With her massive skull propped up next to him, auctioneer Cyril Koller kicked off bidding from his dais. It was like letting go of an unknotted, inflated balloon. We had barely inched past the reserve price of 4.5 million Swiss francs, when the auctioneer, perhaps in disbelief, lingered a bit around the last bid and called it a night. Trinity, the Frankensaur, had sold in under a minute for an underwhelming 4.8 million Swiss francs. It may have had something to do with the fact that, as vertebrate paleontologist Thomas Holtz from the University of Maryland said, Trinity “really isn’t a ‘specimen’ so much as it is an art installation”. He finds it “misleading” and “inappropriate… to combine multiple real bones from different individuals to create a single skeleton.”
I suspect this marker of integrity means a lot more to scholars than to those only seeking to fill their curiosity cabinets. When a yacht won’t cut it as a status symbol anymore, a dinosaur must do.
For Trinity, the winning bid came in over the phone. All we know about her new owner is that they are a private European collector of modern art and dinosaur fossils. Koller says the T-Rex “will remain in Europe” and shows optimism about her ending up on loan to a museum. For now, she rests packed away in boxes with what I can only assume is one hell of an instruction manual. We can sit on that while we ponder what this strange tale says about our current state of affairs. Should wealth be the only factor when it comes to buying a dinosaur? Koller’s auction title was “Out of This World”, but how about in this world? Should there be no rules to protect those few things of greater common interest?
