Voices: Who wouldn’t spend $50m on a dinosaur if they had the cash?

I was in Berlin this week with a bunch of global Natural History Museum directors – I run the one in South Kensington, the one you may be most familiar with – when Gus the Tyrannosaurus rex went under the hammer for an astonishing $50m. Sadly, none of us had the cash to bid! What is it that makes a collection of ancient, fossilised bones worth that kind of money?

The obvious answer is that dinosaurs are rare. But lots of things are rare, and they don’t attract that sort of money. Perhaps what makes dinosaurs different is that they occupy a unique place in our imagination. In an age when so much seems to divide us, dinosaurs remain one of the rare subjects to inspire wonder across generations and cultures in every country.

A record-breaking auction price is really a testament to something much larger than wealth. It reflects our enduring fascination with creatures that disappeared 66 million years ago but have never really left our collective imagination.

The interesting question isn’t why someone would spend $50m on a dinosaur – it’s why we’re all so captivated by them.

Perhaps it’s because dinosaurs are the closest thing we have to dragons that actually existed. They were real. They were huge. They dominated life on Earth for around 200 million years before vanishing in one of the most dramatic events in our planet’s history. There’s even evidence that the discovery of dinosaur bones inspired dragon myths.

Yet they’re also endlessly surprising. Who knew that birds are living dinosaurs? Who knew that many dinosaurs had feathers? Or that they were fast-moving animals with lightweight honeycomb bone structures and remarkably efficient respiratory systems? Even after nearly two centuries of research, discoveries continue to overturn long-held assumptions.

Recently, our scientists identified Enigmacursor, an entirely new dinosaur species from a fossil that had spent decades assigned to another animal. Another remarkable species, Spicomellus, revealed armour unlike anything seen before, with enormous spikes fused directly to its skeleton. Finds such as these remind us that the age of dinosaur discovery is far from over.

People tend to think of dinosaurs as a failed species. Call someone a dinosaur and it’s not particularly flattering. Yet dinosaurs were the dominant megafauna for more than 200 million years. Barring that asteroid strike, they’d probably still be with us today. Homo sapiens have been top dogs for perhaps 30,000 years.

Let’s make it to at least a million before we start discussing who’s the failed species. Just as important is what dinosaurs teach us about ourselves. I’ve often watched visitors arrive expecting to be impressed by the sheer scale of a dinosaur skeleton and leave talking instead about how scientists pieced an entire animal together from fragments of evidence. We saw that when our team brought Fern, our bronze Diplodocus, to life. Visitors weren’t just fascinated by the finished sculpture; they wanted to understand the detective work behind it – how palaeontologists, engineers and artists worked together to reconstruct an animal that last walked the Earth 150 million years ago. That shift from awe to curiosity is one of the most rewarding parts of my job. And I’ll let you into a little secret: Fern’s 292 bronze bones are held together by nothing more than a tightly strung steel cable. Come on a windy day and see a dinosaur come back to life!

People don’t just fall in love with dinosaur bones. They fall in love with the story of how we uncover the past. That’s why dinosaurs occupy such a special place in public life. Few scientific subjects capture the imagination so completely. I’ll never forget hearing young kids screaming “We love you, Dippy!” as the nation’s favourite dinosaur drew rock star crowds on every stop of its remarkable national tour. Dinosaurs have an extraordinary ability to spark conversations about evolution, extinction, climate change, biodiversity and humanity’s place in nature.

They are often a child’s first encounter with science. For many people, they become the beginning of a lifelong curiosity about the natural world. And perhaps that’s their greatest value – not in what they sell for, but in what they teach us. Museums have spent generations helping turn extraordinary fossils into shared cultural treasures.

So if you have a spare $50m, by all means treat yourself to a T-rex. If not, there’s a fantastic day out awaiting you in South Kensington. Come and see some of the world’s most extraordinary dinosaurs. They’re free. And their real value is beyond measure.

Douglas Gurr is the director of the Natural History Museum

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