Phillips auction house will debut a new category called "Out of This World" within its Modern & Contemporary Art Evening Sale on November 18 in New York, headlined by "Cera," a 66-million-year-old juvenile Triceratops skeleton. The specimen, excavated in 2016 from South Dakota's Hell Creek Formation, is the first full juvenile Triceratops ever discovered and the first Triceratops of any kind to appear at a U.S. auction in over a decade, with an estimate of up to $3.5 million. The sale also includes other natural-history rarities such as a large gold nugget and a fossilized marine reptile.
The sale marks Phillips' formal expansion into cross-category collecting, blurring the line between fine art and natural-history artifacts. By placing a dinosaur skeleton alongside blue-chip contemporary art, Phillips signals a growing market trend where museum-grade natural-history specimens are treated as collectible luxury objects, potentially opening new revenue streams for auction houses and attracting a broader base of high-net-worth collectors.