What’s the point of a $US42 billion ($63 billion) fortune if you can’t occasionally drop a fraction of it on an awe-inspiring dinosaur fossil?

On Wednesday, a Stegosaurus nicknamed “Apex” sold at Sotheby’s for almost $US45 million, around nine times the auction house’s presale estimate, making it the most valuable fossil ever sold at an auction. The identity of the deep-pocketed mystery buyer soon emerged: Ken Griffin, the chief executive officer and founder of hedge fund Citadel. “Apex was born in America and is going to stay in America!” he said.

The enormous price is certain to spark complaints from palaeontologists that our natural history is being privatised by the financial elite, but I’m far more relaxed: the profit motive should help unearth more amazing dinos.

Of course, it would be deeply uncool to keep one of these specimens hidden away in the atrium of your mega-mansion, but fortunately that isn’t what the buyer plans to do: the skeleton will be loaned to a US museum, the Wall Street Journal reported. That’s where dinosaurs belong, so on a rainy weekend they can be gazed at in wonder by kids and their parents.

One could argue the money would do more good if given directly to researchers, but this astonishing outlay is likely to further stoke the hunt for fossils. Unlike in many countries where dinosaur finds belong to the state and exports are banned, US landowners get to keep skeletons found on their property.

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“The fossils that are being discovered are ones that are slowly being exposed due to erosion and weather events,” Cassandra Hatton, Sotheby’s science and historic artefacts specialist and the organiser of this week’s sale, told me last year. “You can either have a commercial palaeontologist carefully excavating these or you can lose them forever, take your pick.”

In this instance, the landowner happened to be a professional fossil hunter, a good advertisement for following your passion. Marketing a ranch in fossil-rich Colorado, where Apex was found in 2022, definitely just got easier for real estate agents.

More surprising is that Griffin paid $US45 million for a small-brained herbivore.