A dinosaur skeleton that sold for a jaw-dropping $47.3 million at auction in New York on Oct. 27 had a tie to South Dakota. Sotheby’s, the auctioneer, had estimated that Jodi the dinosaur would sell for between $6 million and $9 million.
Jodi was discovered in 2019 by Jodi Pierson, who was wandering her ranch in Garfield County, Montana. Clayton Phipps, a legendary Montana fossil hunter known as the Dinosaur Cowboy, was brought in to excavate the find. It appeared to be the skeleton of a juvenile tyrannosaur, but Phipps had questions about the specimen he was recovering.
So he called Pete Larson, the founder of the Black Hills Institute of Geological Research in Hill City, to advise, according to Sotheby’s. Larson is an expert on the T-rex, and he has long advocated that skeletons like Jodi belonged to a distinct genus of dinosaur.
