Overview

• Heritage Auctions’ Nature & Science sale is scheduled for Aug. 29 at 11 a.m. CDT, offering paleontological specimens alongside extraterrestrial material.
• A dire wolf skull with an original upper cranium and a cast lower jaw carries a $30,000 starting estimate, with the upper portion found in Iowa’s Nishnabotna River.
• A towering cave bear skeleton from Romania is estimated at $25,000, while a roughly 70% complete Tylosaurus mosasaur skull from Texas is estimated at $30,000.
• Other lots include a Tyrannosaurus rex tooth from Wyoming estimated at $12,000, a vertebra from Montana’s Hell Creek Formation estimated at $6,000, a lunar meteorite found in Western Sahara in 2023 estimated at $25,000, and a 70-gram Martian meteorite estimated at $15,000.
• Coverage notes rising demand after July’s multimillion-dollar results for a large Martian meteorite and a juvenile Ceratosaurus, with fresh attention to dire-wolf material linked to recent de-extinction experiments.