Joopiter’s First Fossil Sale Brings $5.55 Million for “Trey” the Triceratops
A Triceratops that spent decades under museum lights has now made auction history online. A 66-million-year-old skeleton nicknamed Trey sold for $5.55 million on Joopiter, marking the platform’s first fossil offering and, according to the company, the priciest fossil specimen ever to achieve a result in an online-only auction.
The sale places Joopiter — founded by musician and record producer Pharrell Williams — into a fast-heating corner of the collectibles market where natural history, trophy objects, and contemporary taste increasingly overlap. Trey sold within estimate, Joopiter said.
Beyond the price, the platform leaned on the specimen’s public-facing past. Trey spent roughly three decades on continuous loan and on view at a museum, a history that also supported scientific study, according to Andre Lujan, a paleontologist and the CEO of the Texas-based commercial paleontology firm PaleoTex, who consulted on the sale.
“Paleontology is built on specimens as data points,” Lujan said in an email. “Trey is one among many of these that help us better understand this extinct group of horned dinosaurs.” He also described the skeleton as a “cultural data point,” pointing to its place in the long, sometimes contested history of commercial paleontology in the United States and the role of citizen scientists in building research collections.
Trey was excavated in 1993 near Lusk, Wyoming, by paleontologist Allen Graffham and his partner Lee Campbell. The remains came from the Lance Formation, a Late Cretaceous site known for yielding fossils of Tyrannosaurus Rex, Edmontosaurus, and, most abundantly, Triceratops.
After its discovery, the skeleton entered a private collection and was sent to Germany for restoration and mounting. By 1995, it had arrived at the Wyoming Dinosaur Center, where it remained on display for 30 years. Lujan noted that Trey is the only dinosaur skeleton acquired through Graffham to come to market in the past two decades.
For Joopiter, the consignment extends a brand identity built largely on archival fashion and contemporary art tied to high-profile names. The platform has previously offered material connected to figures including Kim Jones and Maripol, and it has positioned itself as a place where collecting can move fluidly between categories.
Caitlin Donovan, Joopiter’s head of sale, framed Trey as a test case for that broader ambition. “To look at this Triceratops, which has inspired wonder in museum visitors for over 30 years, is to understand a cultural artifact of the utmost significance,” she said in an email. Donovan added that the company aims to expand “the canon of collectability” into “unexpected, and extraordinary territory.”
The result arrives amid sustained demand for headline-grabbing prehistoric material. In 2025, Sotheby’s sold a juvenile Ceratosaurus fossil for $30.5 million, while Phillips achieved $5.4 million for a young Triceratops skeleton in its first dinosaur auction. At Heritage Auctions, a dire wolf skull brought $52,500, nearly doubling its estimate.
Those prices have also sharpened a familiar ethical debate: when rare specimens move into private hands, public access and scientific study can be constrained. Recent high-profile examples suggest one possible compromise, with collectors opting for donations or long-term loans. Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt and his wife, Wendy, donated a Pachycephalosaurus skull — acquired for $1.7 million at Sotheby’s — to the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History in December. And Apex, the Stegosaurus skeleton bought for $44 million by Ken Griffin, has gone on view at New York’s American Museum of Natural History on long-term loan.
Joopiter’s fossil debut, and Trey’s $5.55 million result, underscores how quickly the market is professionalizing around objects once associated primarily with research institutions — and how the question of stewardship is now inseparable from the spectacle of the sale.
