✨ We All Love Dinosaurs

Everyone Loves Dinosaurs.

Here’s the Reason…

In mid-July at Sotheby’s, I toured an upcoming Natural History auction with Cassandra Hatton, the Global Head of Science & Natural History. On display was a juvenile Ceratosaurus that, just days later, would unexpectedly become the third most expensive dinosaur ever sold at $30.5 million.

During our conversation, Cassandra made an casual remark that stuck with me: “It’s not a coloring book dinosaur.” 

She was pointing out that the big names like T. rex, Triceratops, Stegosaurus tend to dominate both pop culture and auction results, while the less Jurrasic-Park’ish species fly under the radar. 

It was the first time I’d heard the phrase used in this context, and it hit me because it captures something bigger - from preschool coloring books to adulthood, dinosaurs never leave us. In America in particular, that obsession is practically baked into childhood. You learn those “Big 3” names as early as you learn colors. 

Dinosaurs are the first myths most of us inherit. Before religion, before politics, before the weight of money or the logic of math, there are the creatures that roamed the Earth 65 million years ago. They’re the first brush with scale, the first time we’re told that something so large, so terrifying, so strange once existed in the very dirt beneath our sneakers. 

They arrive in the form of plastic toys, lunchbox decals, and elementary school worksheets. By the time big budget dino movies hit screens in the 90s, the cultural groundwork had already been laid. Dinosaurs weren’t just extinct animals, they were part of the national curriculum of wonder. They’re one of the few cultural touchstones that remain relevant at every stage of life, always capable of triggering memory and fascination.

And unlike most fragments of early imagination, this one doesn’t fade. It follows you into adulthood - through movies, museums, documentaries, and now, auction catalogs where the prices attached to them climb higher every year. 

To understand why dinosaurs matter so deeply, and why billionaires are battling for them at Sotheby’s and Christie’s, you have to break down the fascination into three strands: Nostalgia, Mystery, and Money (and this applies to ALL of you reading this, I promise)…

Nostalgia: The Universal Toy

If you walk into any toy aisle in America, you’ll see dinosaurs everywhere. They sit alongside superheroes and video game characters, but unlike those, they aren’t the product of branding or licensing. They belong to everyone.

For many, the obsession starts with a plastic T. rex. It doesn’t matter if you grew up in Wichita Kansas or Brooklyn NY, you probably had one. Dinosaurs are the rare cultural artifact that cuts across class, geography, and generation. They don’t require translation. They (mostly) aren’t loaded with social or political or societal baggage. They’re the “easy” toy.

The American Museum of Natural History in New York City has been running some version of its dinosaur hall since 1905. For decades, families have made pilgrimages there, just as they might to the Statue of Liberty or Disneyland. If you grew up in the ’80s or ’90s, you almost certainly remember the toy tie-ins with The Land Before Time, the Happy Meal dinosaurs from McDonald’s, and eventually Spielberg’s Jurassic Park merchandising blitz that sold more than $1 billion worth of toys in its first year. For context, Labubu has not yet had a billion dollar year - thats the rarest of rarified air in the toy world. 

What’s striking is that dinosaurs occupy the same shelf space in the brain as Santa Claus or Batman, but they aren’t fictional. They were real. You could hold a piece of one in your hand if you were lucky enough to find a fossil. That bridge between fantasy and reality is extremely powerful, and it means your childhood obsession has the potential to graduate into an adult pursuit.

And that’s exactly what’s happening now.

Mystery: A Story Without an Ending

The fascination isn’t just because dinosaurs are giant or strange. It’s because their story isn’t finished.

Science keeps rewriting the script. Every year a new discovery changes what we thought we knew. A century ago, Brontosaurus was the king of the sauropods, until scientists started to question whether or not it even existed (technically, there's no such thing as a Brontosaurus as it’s own species). It’s still one of the most popular dinosaurs amongst all age groups. A few years ago, it was resurrected again as a distinct genus.

We once thought dinosaurs were slow, plodding reptiles; now we know many were fast, agile, some even feathered. While we have a general concept of what color dinosaurs were (melanosomes can help us detect some colors such as black, gray, reddish brown, and iridescent) here are some parts of the dinosaur color range we can't detect at all. We’re basically guessing when illustrations are made. The picture shifts with every dig.

That fluidity is part of the draw. Dinosaurs are a canvas onto which we project our own era’s imagination. In the Victorian age, they were lumbering dragons. In the ’90s, Spielberg gave us velociraptors as hyper-intelligent predators. Today, paleoartists render them with feathers, technicolor hides, and postures that feel almost birdlike.

But the mystery doesn’t stop at science. Dinosaurs sit at the fault line between faith and fact. A 2019 poll showed that 41% of Americans believe humans and dinosaurs lived on Earth at the same time. 27% of those polled said “probably.” 14% said “Definitely.” 

Just to reiterate, 14% of adults are POSITIVE that HUMAN BEINGS AND DINOSAURS LIVED IN THE SAME PLACE AT THE SAME TIME.

It’s a bit wacky, but its really not that hard to see why: outside of the Jurassic Park Effect, they are the ultimate test of imagination, proof that the past is stranger than we’re comfortable admitting.

This uncertainty gives them an aura that paintings or coins don’t have. A Monet is a Monet. A 1793 penny will always be a penny. But a dinosaur? It’s a puzzle. The bones are just pieces of a story we’re still writing. And people will always pay for mystery.

Money: The Billionaire’s Trophy

The last 15 years has seen dinosaurs make the leap from museum halls to auction blocks. And the numbers tell the story better than anything.

2010: Sotheby’s sells a nearly complete Allosaurus for $1.3 million.

2013: A pair of fighting dinosaurs, locked in combat, go to auction in New York with estimates north of $7 million.

2020: Stan the T. rex smashes records at Christie’s, selling for $31.8 million to an anonymous buyer later revealed to be a museum in Abu Dhabi, a new world record.

2022: A Gorgosaurus skeleton fetches $6.1 million.

2024: A Stegosaurus named “Apex” sells for $44.6 million, a new world record.

2025: The only juvenile Ceratosaurus to ever come to auction smashes its $4M-$6M estimate selling for $30.5 million.

These aren’t curiosities anymore. They are real trophies. For billionaires who already own the Picassos and the Basquiats, the Gulfstreams and the yachts, what’s left? A dinosaur skeleton? A piece of Earth’s deep time becomes the ultimate flex. 

Scarcity drives the frenzy. Unlike fine art, you can’t make more dinosaurs. Every new skeleton pulled from the ground makes the remaining supply smaller. The best examples - the most complete, articulated, and scientifically significant - are a once-in-a-generation find. They can often take years to excavate and then mount into the positions we see them in on auction stages and in museums. When they hit the market, the world watches.

This dynamic mirrors what’s happening across all high-end collectibles. The rarest Pateks, the cleanest Ferrari F40s, the first-printing Constitutions - they all share the same gravitational pull: scarcity plus cultural significance equals price escalation. Dinosaurs just operate on an even bigger scale, both physically and financially.

The American Fascination

There’s a reason dinosaurs have taken hold so strongly in the U.S. in particular. Unlike Europe, where centuries of castles and cathedrals remind people of human history, America’s monuments are natural: canyons, mountains, petrified forests, fossil beds. Dinosaurs fit into that myth of the frontier. Proof, even after the grand halls and earliest architecture has been torn down and replaced with the soulless office parks and glass monuments to individual wealth, that our soil holds giants.

The first major dinosaur discoveries in the 19th century (during the so-called “Bone Wars” between O.C. Marsh and Edward Drinker Cope) turned fossil hunting into national theater. Railroads shipped bones eastward, newspapers turned them into front-page headlines, and museums competed to mount the biggest, tallest skeletons. Dinosaurs became American in the same way jazz and baseball did: by sheer spectacle.

That cultural DNA persists. When kids today visit a natural history museum, they’re seeing the continuation of a national tradition. It’s a ritual of awe passed down for over a century - one of very few we’re able to truly own.

Why They’ll Only Get Bigger

The market for dinosaurs is not slowing down. Supply is shrinking, demand is broadening, and cultural relevance is at an all-time high.

Every new blockbuster (Jurassic World: Dominion grossed over $1 billion globally) reminds the world’s children that these creatures matter. Every new discovery, like the feathered dinosaur tails found preserved in amber, rekindles fascination among adults. And every new auction record sets a new benchmark for the wealthy.

Dinosaurs are nostalgia for kids, mystery for adults, and money for collectors. That trifecta ensures they’ll never really go extinct. It’s got a space for everyone… and even though they might be behind velvet ropes or in Jeff Bezos’ living room, they belong to everyone. They’re as much a part of a child’s toy chest as they are a billionaire’s trophy room. They straddle science and speculation, culture and commerce, the past and the present.

One of the biggest unlocks is that most collectibles are niche. They require explanation, education, or some sort of personal attachment. Dinosaurs don’t. Everyone already knows them. Everyone already has a favorite. That shared cultural ownership makes them uniquely powerful.

And in a world where scarcity drives value, they may be the most irreplaceable collectible of all. Not just because they’re rare, but because they carry something money doesn’t usually buy: universal wonder.

Dinosaurs are the only asset class that starts in kindergarten and ends in a museum. And that might be the most valuable thing of all.

🦖

Until Next Week...