Good morning. It’s Wednesday. Today we’ll meet a stegosaurus that is about to get a new owner. We’ll also get details on Senator Robert Menendez’s conviction on corruption charges.
Every stegosaurus has its day, and this is Apex’s. Consider:
-
Apex is immediately recognizable — a “coloring book dinosaur,” an auction-house expert calls it.
-
Apex is tall, at 11 feet, and long, 27 feet from nose to tail.
-
Male or female? No one knows. But Apex did not lead a sexless life.
Apex, who roamed the Earth 150 million years ago in the Late Jurassic Period, is to be auctioned today at Sotheby’s in New York. Sotheby’s expects Apex to sell for $3 million to $4 million.
That would make Apex the latest in a parade of big-money dinosaurs. A Tyrannosaurus rex skeleton known as Stan sold for nearly $32 million in October 2020, and in 2022, the remains of a Deinonychus antirrhopus, the creature that inspired the Velociraptor in “Jurassic Park,” went for $12.4 million. Later that year, Sotheby’s sold a Gorgosaurus, a T. rex relative from 80 million years ago, for $6.1 million.
Those dinosaurs followed in the tracks of a T. rex skeleton known as Sue that was auctioned for $8.4 million in 1997 to the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago. At the time The New York Times called the price — about $16.3 million in today’s dollars — “staggering.”
Sales of dinosaur fossils have upset paleontologists who resent the commercialization of evolutionary history. Scientists also worry that fossils will be priced out of the reach of institutions, and that in private collections, they would be unavailable for future research.
“I’ve heard that many times,” said Cassandra Hatton, Sotheby’s global head of science and popular culture. “My experience has been that most people who buy these want to give them to a museum or loan them to a museum. People who buy them ask me, ‘What museum should I give this to?’ or ‘Do you know a museum that needs one of these?’”
She said she had “a couple of clients” who are building their own museums so they can share their purchases with the public. “I don’t know anyone who wants to buy a dinosaur and hide it in a bunker or something,” she said.
But Jim Kirkland, the state paleontologist for Utah, declined to endorse Apex when Jason Cooper, the commercial paleontologist who discovered the fossil in 2022, asked him to. “I will not promote something going to auction,” Kirkland told The New York Times by email in May.
So, about Apex.
Cooper found Apex on land he owned in a place called — yes — Dinosaur, Colo., about a 300-mile drive from Denver, where other digs have yielded Jurassic dinosaurs. Cooper has donated several of them to museums. But in the case of Apex, Sotheby’s said it had “collaborated closely” with Cooper to document the process of preparing for auction, starting with excavating the fossil and doing three-dimensional scans of the bones.
The auction house said that Apex is almost a third larger than Sophie, a stegosaurus in the National History Museum in London. Apex’s femur is 45 inches long. Hatton said that Apex had lived to an advanced age, a conclusion reached because the fossil showed signs of arthritis.
What about Apex’s gender?
“Impossible to know,” Hatton said.
Gender could be deduced from skin impressions in the soil where the fossil was found, she said, but the only such impressions were from Apex’s neck, not the lower part of its body.
But there are bubbles in the bone around the pelvis — “the result of infection that would have been caused by mating,” she said, “so it had friends.”
Weather
New York will roast again today, with temperatures in the low 90s, although the National Weather Service — which extended its heat advisory through this evening — said it could feel as hot as 98. An approaching cool front will produce heavy, gusty thunderstorms this afternoon and evening. The temperature will slide to the low 70s.
ALTERNATE-SIDE PARKING
In effect until Aug. 13 (Tisha B’Av).
The latest New York news
-
The price of halting congestion pricing: Transit leaders had already allocated hundreds of millions of dollars before Gov. Kathy Hochul’s last-minute reversal on the long-awaited tolling plan. That money may go to waste.
-
Charged as a South Korean spy: An expert on North Korea who used to work for the Central Intelligence Agency — and who more recently has been a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York — was charged with acting as an agent for Seoul in exchange for upscale dinners and designer handbags.
-
Exiled Chinese billionaire convicted: A federal jury found that Guo Wengui, a former Beijing insider who became a favorite of the American right, had defrauded investors of hundreds of millions of dollars. He could face decades in prison.
-
Sweltering in shelters: Families living in city homeless shelters need a doctor’s note to install air-conditioners. Some residents say shelters still make it difficult to get them.
-
Inbound to Terminal 6: Works by 18 contemporary artists from seven countries will be featured at the new $4.2 billion terminal at Kennedy International Airport.
-
Food critic bows: After more than a decade as the Times restaurant critic, Pete Wells decides to move on. “I knew I needed to change my life,” he wrote. “I promised I’d start just as soon as I’d eaten in the other 70 restaurants on my spreadsheet.”
Menendez convicted of corruption
Over three days, the jury deliberated for a total of 13 hours, six hours less than the time it had taken the prosecution and the defense to make their closing arguments in the bribery case against Senator Robert Menendez of New Jersey.
The verdict: guilty on all 16 counts, including bribery, conspiracy, obstruction of justice and acting as an agent for Egypt.
The government had accused Menendez, the former chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, of participating in a vast international bribery scheme. Prosecutors said he had sold his office, accepting hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of payoffs — including solid gold bars and a luxury car — in return for political favors.
With the verdict, Menendez, who is 70, became the first United States senator to be found guilty of acting as an agent of a foreign power.
Menendez said he was “deeply, deeply disappointed by the jury’s decision.”
“I have never, ever been a foreign agent,” he said outside the courthouse in Lower Manhattan. He also said that he had “never been anything but a patriot of my country and for my country,” and that he believed the verdict would be overturned on appeal.
But the outcome of the two-month trial will almost certainly turn up the pressure for Menendez to leave office before his term expires at the end of the year. Soon after the verdict was read, Senator Chuck Schumer, Democrat of New York and the majority leader, called on Menendez to step down promptly. Schumer had allowed Menendez to stay in the Senate for months as the trial unfolded. The question now is whether Menendez will listen or whether Schumer will have to schedule an expulsion vote.
Prosecutors presented testimony and other evidence that placed him at the center of a web of corruption that intermingled sensitive matters of security in the Middle East and the backroom dealings of the senator’s home state.
Menendez was charged with steering aid and weapons to Egypt, using his clout to help the government of Qatar and propping up a lucrative halal certification monopoly for Wael Hana, 40, a businessman who was convicted with him. A third defendant in the case — Fred Daibes, 66, a real estate developer accused of funneling bribes to the senator and his wife, Nadine Menendez — was also found guilty.
METROPOLITAN diary
On the M72
Dear Diary:
The evening lights of New York City were beginning to twinkle as the driver pulled the M72 to a slow stop. A middle-aged man with an unsteady gait got on pulling a small, rolling suitcase.
Just as the bus started to pull away and gain speed, the man sat bolt upright.
“I forgot a bag,” he exclaimed.
The driver eased to a stop, and the man shuffled off with the rolling bag to retrieve the one he had forgotten. The driver waited until the man was back on board and safely seated before pulling away again.
Before getting off at the last stop, I paused on the steps and thanked the driver for being so patient with the passenger. He smiled.
“I do what I can,” he said.
— Bruce J. M. Knopf
Illustrated by Agnes Lee. Send submissions here and read more Metropolitan Diary here.
Glad we could get together here. See you tomorrow. — J.B.
P.S. Here’s today’s Mini Crossword and Spelling Bee. You can find all our puzzles here.
Francis Mateo and Ed Shanahan contributed to New York Today. You can reach the team at [email protected].
Sign up here to get this newsletter in your inbox.
The post This Stegosaurus (Skeleton) Is for Sale appeared first on New York Times.
