Pharrell’s Auction House Sold a Triceratops for $5.5 Million, a Record for an Online Dinosaur Sale

Pharrell Williams just ran the most expensive online dinosaur sale in history. “Trey,” a triceratops skeleton about 66 million years old, sold for $5.5 million on Joopiter, the auction platform he launched in 2022, on Tuesday (March 31). The Art Newspaper reported that the buyer is undisclosed; Hypebeast, citing Joopiter, put the final figure at $5,550,000.

The estimate was $4.5 million to $5.5 million, so the skeleton landed at the top of its range. It was dug out of the Lance Formation near Lusk, Wyoming, in 1993, the year Jurassic Park came out, during the so-called Bone Rush. It is a young, still-growing animal, more than five meters long and more than 70 percent original fossil, and it stood in the Wyoming Dinosaur Center from the center’s 1995 opening for almost three decades.

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Joopiter’s pitch for the sale leaned on the museum history. Hypebeast reported that more than one million visitors saw the skeleton while it was on loan. “Some discoveries transcend category, reminders of how vast time really is,” Joopiter CEO John Auerbach said when the sale was announced in March.

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ARTnews calls the result “further evidence of a larger trend”: fossils are leaving the natural-history niche and being sold like any other high-end collectible. Christie’s opened the door in 2020 with the $31.8 million sale of the T. rex “Stan,” and Sotheby’s followed with a $30.5 million Ceratosaurus in 2025 and the $44.6 million stegosaurus “Apex” in 2024, the record. Joopiter, which built its name on design, fashion and cultural ephemera, now has a place in that story. The sale came days after Art Basel Hong Kong showed the market warming up, and our first-half auction roundup puts it in the year’s picture.

The paleontologist Andre LuJan, who examined Trey for the sale, has been blunt about the cost of that boom. Speaking to The New York Times last year, as quoted by The Art Newspaper, he said rising prices are changing the land under the fossils too.

Landowners see the market rise and think, ‘Oh, we’re not charging enough for our leases,’

Andre LuJan, paleontologist, The Art Newspaper, quoting The New York Times

The tension is real. Commercial excavation has long sat uneasily beside academic paleontology, and ARTnews notes that every record sale sharpens the worry that important specimens are being pulled into private hands.

Pharrell’s tie-in was the kind of thing his audience expects: a capsule collection from the Los Angeles labels 424 and Hoorsenbuhs, made with the cultural platform Co-Museum, which also benefits from the proceeds. Joopiter has since leaned further into big objects. It has also offered two other dinosaur skeletons, estimated at up to $1.2 million each, according to Hypebeast, plus a Michael Jordan Finals jersey.

ARTnews’s reading is that a $5.5 million triceratops sold with no live evening sale is “not a stunt,” just a mid-market deal in a category that has fully joined the auction mainstream. The headline numbers still belong to Sotheby’s and Christie’s. The testing ground, it says, is elsewhere.

Added to the High Grailed archive on October 12, 2026.