On the sale of a dead stegosaurus

The bidding starts at 3 million dollars. This is enough to feed 360 Australian families of 4 for a year. It is also enough to sponsor Ian for 5208 years (should Ian outlive the 61.5 year life expectancy attributed to 9-year-old boys in the Muzarabani Project, Zimbabwe).

Unimaginable wealth spread out across the globe has its whispered wishes bounced from satellites and into the raised hands of immaculately dressed bidders clutching iPhones in Sotheby’s, New York. Two bids and six seconds later it hits 3.5 million. One minute into the auction, the complete stegosaurus fossil, nicknamed ‘Apex’, attracts a 5-million-dollar bid. Bidding wars crescendo and pop one after the other as the price for the dead lizard leaps in increments of half a million to a million dollars.

Nose to tail, Apex stands 11 feet tall and 27 feet long.

The price climbs as the auctioneer leans over her podium, responding to successive million-dollar hikes with an affected and playful nonchalance. I’m glued to the screen in much the same way I might find myself surprisingly emotionally invested in a sport whose rules I don’t understand being played between two teams I’ve never heard of.

Shortly after fetching 44.6 million dollars, a recording of the auction of Apex will be uploaded to Sotheby’s YouTube account.

I imagine what it might be like to hold a 44.6 million dollar dead stegosaurus hostage in your living room while child sponsorship ads roll silently by on a muted television in the corner.

I imagine this recording one day unfurling itself out from the neck of an hourglass as an unkind and unflattering historical artefact from a day and age that saw more investment in data points and time stamps—fossils, etc—than the hungry mouths of billions living. I imagine some artificially intelligent race of curious humanoids in ten thousand years or more busily excavating like digital archeologists through layers of data, centuries at a time, for insights into the character of their creator.

I hope that for the sake of their own creations, and unlike their more brittle forebears, that they know better than to revere what they find.