Rare Nanotyrannus skeleton goes on display at NYC Sothebys before heading to historic auction
On quick glance, the fossil unveiled Tuesday at a Manhattan auction house looks like an undersized Tyrannosaurus rex, with its signature gaping jaw filled with razor sharp teeth.But the proportions are off, as its arms and legs are much too long.That’s because the dinosaur skeleton isn’t actually a T.
rex but a recently confirmed distant cousin.The Nanotyrannus, as this smaller, nimbler predator is known, is on view in the lobby of Sotheby’s headquarters ahead of its Oct.
27 auction.Standing 6.5 feet (2 meters) tall and stretching nearly 20 feet (6 meters) long, the rare fossil is one of only three such skeletons known to exist.“What’s really exciting is that until they proved this genus existed, we thought that T.rex was the only apex predator of the Cretaceous,” said Cassandra Hatton, a vice chair at Sotheby’s.
“We now know that they coexisted.They lived alongside each other, occupying distinct niches in the ecological system.”A decades-long scientific debate kicked off with the 1942 discovery of what’s now considered the first Nanotyrannus head, the so-called “Cleveland Skull” housed at the Cleveland Museum of Natural History.Fast forward to October 2025, when new research concluded that the Nanotyrannus was in fact a distinct genus of dinosaur that coexisted with T.
rex.Scientists examining the growth rings within preserved bones found the dinosaurs were fully formed adults, not juveniles.The research challenged long-held assumptions that the mighty “King of the Tyrant Lizards” was the sole large predator of the Cretaceous period, some 67 million years ago.“It’s like a lion and a cheetah,” Hatton explains.
“They hunted different prey.They were around at the same time.
It’s possible T.rex ate these.”Indeed, there are more than 150 key differences between the Nanotyrannus and T.
rex, the most noticeable being their sizes.At about 18 feet (5.5 meters) long, an adult Nanotyrannus was about half the length of an adult T....