Forget Shark Week: Now’s Your Chance to Own a 190 Million-Year-Old Ocean Monster
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Sotheby’s is selling mounted fossil skeletons of a Pteranodon from the late Cretaceous and a Plesiosaur from the lower Jurassic—both considered fearsome predators—at a natural history auction on July 26 in New York.
The Pteranodon, a flying species that existed some 85 million years ago, is expected to achieve as much as US$6 million. The Plesiosaur, a marine reptile that existed 190 million years ago, could achieve as much as US$800,000.
The fossils continue Sotheby’s foray into selling dinosaur bones. A year ago, the auction house sold a Gorgosaurus fossil for US$6.1 million, and in December, a Tyrannosaurus rex skull nicknamed Maximus also sold for US$6.1 million. Both sales include fees. The latter result fell far short of expectations that the 200-plus pound skull could fetch as much as US$20 million.
Fossil bones of the Pteranodon—named “Horus” in honour of an ancient Egyptian deity of kingship, protection, and sky—were found by an anonymous fossil hunter in 2002 in Logan County in Kansas. The bones had been buried under layers of chalk in the seabed of what was once an inland water body known as the Western Interior Seaway. The water had divided North America into two land masses at the time.
The resulting skeleton is one of the “largest well-preserved Pteranodons ever discovered,” Sotheby’s said in a news release, noting it is also the most complete and highest quality. Also, unusually, most of the original fossil bones are “essentially unrestored” without artificial filler, which the auction said is “especially ideal for scientific study and transparency of authenticity.” Mounted, the skeleton has a 20-foot wingspan.
The flying creature’s skull, however, was created with the help of 3-D restoration to fill in pieces that weren’t found at the site. Filling in missing parts of bone with sculpted epoxies or plasters that are painted to match the fossils is very common in the restoration of dinosaurs, because it’s extremely unlikely to ever dig up a full skeleton, according to Cassandra Hatton, global head of science and popular culture at Sotheby’s.
“You are incredibly lucky if you have half of the pieces,” Hatton says. “You have to fill in those blanks in order to do the kind of 3-D, big T. rexes and Apatosauruses [seen] at Natural History Museums.”
Hatton mentions this as the auction house is selling these fossils in the wake of questions raised about the authenticity of other specimens that have been sold commercially. Perhaps the most high-profile example was the scheduled auction of a T. rex that Christie’s canceled after questions were raised about the specimen’s authenticity. The fossil skeleton was estimated to fetch at least US$15 million.
Clients have become “uncomfortable with the fact that it’s hard for people to tell the
difference, or the fact that unscrupulous people can easily pull the wool over people’s eyes,” Hatton says.
To ensure the Pteranodon’s authenticity is evident, those who prepared it for display didn’t attempt to meld the original fossil bone with sculpted materials. “It’s really clear when you look at it that O.K., ‘this is original’ and ‘this isn’t,’” she says.
The rib cage area, for example, includes a big plate on the sternum that’s original and attached to a sculpted rib cage. But there’s been no attempt to make the rib cage look like actual bone, so what’s real and what isn’t is obvious even to an untrained eye, Hatton says. Potential buyers also will be able to see an osteograph, or bone map, which lists the actual bones in the skeleton, in addition to a site map of the discovery, and photos of the dinosaur bones being excavated
“We wanted to be sure that people understood what was going on,” she says.
The 11-foot-long Plesiosaur Sotheby’s is selling was unearthed in the early 1990s in Blockley quarry, Gloucestershire, England. It was first prepared and studied by Mike Taylor, a British Plesiosaur expert, who discovered that it was a Cryptocleidus, a previously unknown species of the Jurassic, according to a Sotheby’s Paris catalog entry from 2010. The skeleton, which had been in a collection at a private museum in Germany, was sold at that time for €456,750. The current consignor is anonymous.
Unlike the Pteranodon, Sotheby’s doesn’t have a site map or photos of the Plesiosaur’s discovery, because no one at that time probably could have imagined the fossils being sold at a public auction, Hatton says.
The Plesiosaur has been nicknamed ‘Nessie’ in reference to the Loch Ness monster, as many sightings of the mythical beast describe a creature with similar features to the Plesiosaur, including a long neck, small head, and four flippers, Sotheby’s said. Reported sightings of the monster also increased in the years after the first Plesiosaur skeleton was discovered in 1823.
The highest price for a dinosaur skeleton to date is the nearly US$32 million, with fees, paid for a T. rex skeleton dubbed “Stan” in October 2020 at Christie’s in New York. The 39-foot-long skeleton will be displayed at the Natural History Museum Abu Dhabi when the institution opens in 2025.
Visitors to Sotheby’s New York galleries will have a chance to see if they can tell the difference between real bone and plaster casts by visiting the fossils on display before the auction later this month. The natural history sale is one in a series of “geek week” offerings at the auction house that also feature science and technology and space exploration.
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Technology and semiconductor shares fell sharply as investors questioned the debt financing the AI infrastructure boom and confronted higher rates and Chinese competition.
Technology and semiconductor shares fell sharply as investors questioned the debt financing the AI infrastructure boom and confronted higher rates and Chinese competition.
4 minA sharp technology sell-off has exposed a new anxiety on global markets: whether the enormous borrowing behind the artificial-intelligence infrastructure boom can generate sufficient returns as interest rates rise and Chinese competition intensifies.
The artificial-intelligence investment boom has powered technology shares, semiconductor manufacturers and data-centre operators to extraordinary heights. Last week, investors were given a reminder that much of this expansion is being built with borrowed money.
The technology-heavy Nasdaq Composite fell 4.5 per cent over the week ended October 16, its weakest performance since late June. Semiconductor shares suffered an even deeper correction, with the Philadelphia Semiconductor Index losing about 11.4 per cent.
The selling spread quickly through global markets. Micron Technology fell 14.6 per cent over the week, while South Korea’s Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix dropped approximately 18 per cent and 24 per cent respectively.
This was more than a routine bout of profit-taking. Investors were reassessing three interconnected risks: higher interest rates, the rapidly expanding debt burden attached to AI infrastructure and the prospect of stronger competition from Chinese memory-chip manufacturers.
The debt behind the AI build-out
Artificial intelligence requires a physical infrastructure network of enormous scale. Data centres must be built, advanced processors purchased, power supplies secured and cooling systems installed before customers begin generating meaningful revenue from them.
Technology companies are increasingly supplementing their own cash with corporate bonds, syndicated loans, equipment leases, private credit and project-level financing.
JPMorgan describes the emerging funding model as a combination of conventional corporate borrowing and project finance tied to individual data-centre assets. In Australia, the Reserve Bank estimates that syndicated loans accounted for approximately three-quarters of data-centre financing during 2025 and 2026 to date.
The numbers are becoming large enough to affect broader credit markets. The Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas has cited Wall Street estimates suggesting AI-related investment-grade bond issuance could approach US$300 billion in 2026 alone.
That borrowing is not automatically problematic. Debt can be an efficient way to finance long-lived infrastructure when future revenue is sufficiently predictable. The concern is that AI technology, customer demand and computing economics are changing much faster than the repayment schedules attached to the assets.
A data centre financed today may carry debt for years. Investors must therefore make assumptions about future utilisation rates, electricity prices, chip performance, customer concentration and the amount businesses will ultimately pay for AI computing.
When interest rates rise, those assumptions become less forgiving.
Inflation changes the calculation
September’s US inflation data intensified the pressure. Consumer prices increased 3.7 per cent over the year, ahead of market expectations and up from 3.4 per cent in August.
The hotter reading reduced confidence that interest rates would fall quickly and pushed bond yields higher. That matters particularly for companies whose valuations depend on profits expected well into the future, as well as highly leveraged infrastructure operators that may need to refinance.
CoreWeave has emerged as a closely watched test case. The specialist cloud-computing company has accumulated substantial debt and lease obligations to build AI capacity, while relying on a concentrated group of large technology customers.
Its shares fell sharply during the sell-off, while the cost of insuring its debt against default climbed. CoreWeave has argued that its contracted backlog more than covers its obligations and that financial markets do not always understand its business model. Nevertheless, its securities have become a proxy for investor confidence in debt-funded AI infrastructure.
Oracle, another major investor in AI computing capacity, fell 8.8 per cent in Friday trading, while CoreWeave dropped 15.5 per cent.
The question is shifting from how much AI infrastructure can be built to how profitably it can be operated.
China adds another source of pressure
Interest rates were not the only catalyst. Reports of advances by Chinese memory-chip producer ChangXin Memory Technologies raised concerns that lower-cost Chinese products could increase competition across the global semiconductor industry.
Memory chips are essential to AI systems, but the industry is historically cyclical. Periods of tight supply and high pricing can encourage rapid investment, eventually producing oversupply and falling margins.
The prospect of a well-funded Chinese competitor expanding its technological capabilities unsettled investors in Samsung, SK Hynix and Micron. It also demonstrated that AI-related demand does not insulate chipmakers from conventional competitive pressures.
That combination—slower rate cuts, more expensive financing and potentially cheaper supply—challenged the assumption that every company exposed to AI would enjoy continually expanding margins.
A reset rather than the end of the boom
The sell-off does not establish that the AI boom is ending. Demand for computing power remains strong, the largest technology companies continue to generate formidable cash flows and many infrastructure projects are backed by long-term customer contracts.
What has changed is the market’s willingness to overlook the price and financing structure of that growth.
The most resilient companies are likely to be those able to fund investment from operating cash flow, secure long-duration customers and demonstrate that new capacity will earn returns comfortably above its financing costs.
More speculative operators may face greater scrutiny, particularly where debt is expensive, customers are concentrated or expected revenue depends on demand that has not yet materialised.
For Australian investors, the lesson extends beyond US technology shares. Local data-centre operators, infrastructure funds, electricity suppliers and property groups are increasingly exposed to the same investment cycle.
Artificial intelligence may remain one of the defining growth themes of the decade. But last week’s correction showed that enthusiasm for the technology does not eliminate financial discipline.
The next stage of the AI boom will be judged not only by computing power, model performance or demand for chips, but by something more traditional: whether the assets being financed can generate enough cash to repay the money borrowed to build them.
Fact box
Nasdaq Composite: Down 4.5 per cent for the week ended October 16, 2026
Philadelphia Semiconductor Index: Down approximately 11.4 per cent
Micron Technology: Down approximately 14.6 per cent
Samsung Electronics: Down approximately 18 per cent
SK Hynix: Down approximately 24 per cent
US September inflation: 3.7 per cent annually
Estimated 2026 AI-related investment-grade issuance: Approximately US$300 billion
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