Auction News: The Week Ahead – Two Dinosaurs, a Tiffany Daytona and Haring's Grace Jones

Two dinosaurs frame the week. One has just left the room at Sotheby's New York, after twelve minutes of bidding, at a price that has reopened an old argument among scientists. The other waits at the Hôtel Drouot in Paris, where France is deciding whether a unique Normandy predator is a national treasure or simply lot 203. Between them sit the watch auctions of the season in Monaco and Geneva, two Keith Harings in New York, a Bernard Buffet bouquet and a very good Scottish sale of five centuries of furniture and silver.

Everything below was still open to bidders at the time of writing, apart from the results we report as results. Every lot is linked; check each sale's own page for times, viewing and conditions before you bid.

The result: Jodi, Sotheby's New York

The week's headline was made on Tuesday 27 October. Jodi, a near-complete Nanotyrannus, drew six bidders over twelve minutes before selling on the phone to an anonymous buyer, the winning bid taken by Sotheby's specialist Jodi Pollack. The final price was nearly eight times the pre-sale estimate. It makes Jodi the second most valuable dinosaur ever sold at auction, behind only Gus, the Tyrannosaurus rex Sotheby's sold in July, and pushes Apex the Stegosaurus, the record holder as recently as 2024, into third.

The specimen deserves the fuss. Found in 2019 by Jodi Pierson in the Hell Creek Formation of Garfield County, Montana, it stands about ten feet tall, with some 191 bone elements and a virtually complete skull. It is one of only three such skeletons known, and the first to come to market since palaeontologists confirmed that Nanotyrannus is a genus in its own right rather than a teenage T. rex. That last fact is what turned a fine fossil into a trophy, and it is also what makes researchers so uneasy: an animal science has only just agreed exists may now vanish into a private collection.

The fight: Dubreuillosaurus, Hôtel Drouot, Paris

Wednesday 18 November, 2pm, salle 10. Millon offers Dubreuillosaurus valesdunensis as lot 203, and this is not a sale like Jodi's. It is the holotype, the one specimen on which the species was named, and the only one ever found: a Middle Jurassic megalosaurid, some 167 million years old, pulled from the same Caen stone that William the Conqueror used for his abbeys.

The bones were discovered in 1994 by André Dubreuil, mayor of Conteville in Calvados. The Muséum national d'Histoire naturelle and the CNRS excavated them, the skull was reconstructed in 2005, and the palaeontologist Ronan Allain gave the species and then the genus its name. The lot comprises 62 bones and a skull around 70 per cent complete. For years it was shown at the Paléospace museum in Villers-sur-Mer, but it was never formally donated, and after Dubreuil's death in late 2024 his heirs took it back.

The law gives them a chance. The skeleton is classed as a bien culturel, so it cannot be exported without the approval of the Ministry of Culture, and under article L123-1 of the Code du patrimoine the state may pre-empt it in the saleroom, stepping in at the hammer price. A museum has until 10 November to ask for that; at the time of writing none has announced a request. Scientists have launched a petition and a crowdfunding campaign. There is a further twist: a 2024 paper asked whether Dubreuillosaurus is a separate animal at all, or a juvenile Poekilopleuron. A holotype is precisely the bone you need to settle that kind of argument.

Monaco Legend: a result on Saturday, a landmark on Sunday

Monaco Legend's Exclusive Timepieces runs over two sessions at the Hôtel Méridien Beach Plaza. The first, on Saturday 31 October, produced the result we were watching: lot 50, a steel Rolex reference 6062 triple calendar moon phase with the luminous "Explorer" dial, from the collection of the Italian connoisseur John Goldberger. It sold within its estimate. The provenance is the kind collectors dream about: bought in 1955 by a Hong Kong-born student as a graduation present to himself on leaving Imperial College London, kept for more than six decades, and first seen at auction only in 2017.

The same session included a "floating" Big Red Daytona reference 6265, a Paul Newman 6239 recorded in the Pucci Papaleo archive, a white gold Nautilus 3700 and a Vacheron Constantin cloisonné enamel "Americas".

Sunday's session opens at 2.30pm Central European Time, and its centrepiece is lot 234: the first reference 2499 that Patek Philippe ever cased itself. The 2499, a perpetual calendar chronograph with moon phase, ran for some 35 years in about 349 examples, its cases made by outside casemakers such as Wenger. In 1982 Patek's own new workshop, Ateliers Réunis, produced case number 2,792,095 for the fourth-series 2499/100, and this is it, a gold watch with a sapphire crystal, sold with its Extract from the Archives. It marks the moment Patek began bringing the cases of its most complicated watches in-house.

Also on Sunday: a salmon-dial Daytona 16520, a Rolex Sea-Dweller that belonged to Sultan Qaboos of Oman, a Patek Philippe 3974 and a unique Vacheron Constantin jump hour.

Phillips Geneva: the Tiffany Daytona

Phillips's Geneva Watch Auction XXIV takes over the Hotel President on the Geneva lakefront on 7 and 8 November, with viewing from 4 November. The sale is led by a steel Patek Philippe 1436 split-seconds chronograph and the only known 2497 perpetual calendar signed by the retailer Gumbiner. The two Rolexes we would study hardest are side by side in Saturday's first session.

Lot 45 is a Daytona reference 16520 from about 1989, with the white porcelain "floating" dial, so called because the word Cosmograph sits alone above the other text, and here signed Tiffany & Co. Only one other is publicly known. It comes with its warranty stamped by Tiffany and dated 12 January 1990, and was serviced by Rolex in October 2025. The 16520 matters on its own terms: the first automatic Daytona, built around a modified Zenith El Primero movement, and the first with a 40mm case and a sapphire crystal.

Lot 46 is its modern counterpart: a 2019 platinum Daytona 116506 with an ice-blue dial in Eastern Arabic numerals, sold only through retailers in the Middle East and a clear nod to the famous gold "Arabian Knight".

New York: two Harings in two nights

On Monday 16 November, Sotheby's offers Keith Haring's Portrait of Grace Jones as lot 139 in The Now and Contemporary Evening Auction at 7pm. Haring and Jones were one of the great collaborations of 1980s New York: in 1984 he painted her body in his white lines for a shoot photographed by Robert Mapplethorpe. The same evening offers Basquiat's La Vieja, Warhol's Dolly Parton, and works by Ed Ruscha, Willem de Kooning and Yayoi Kusama.

The next night at 4.30pm, Phillips offers an untitled Haring as lot 15 in its Modern and Contemporary Art Evening Sale at 432 Park Avenue, alongside Modigliani's Tête, Clyfford Still, Agnes Martin, Helen Frankenthaler and Frank Stella.

Paris and Edinburgh: roses and mahogany

Bernard Buffet painted flowers with the same black, spiky line he gave everything else, and flower pieces are a staple of his later work. Millon's autumn sale in Boulogne-Billancourt on Monday 9 November, from 9.30am, offers Les roses claires as lot 323: oil on canvas, 73 by 50cm, painted in 1976 and documented by the Galerie Maurice Garnier, which handled Buffet's work for half a century.

In Edinburgh, Lyon & Turnbull's Five Centuries runs on 11 and 12 November, with viewing from the 8th. It is the best kind of country-house sale, where a serious collector can furnish a library. Look at Boudin's harbour scene Port – Bateaux à l'Ancre (lot 441), Lazzerini's Paul et Virginie (lot 475), a Louis XIV side table from Stevenson House, and a portrait miniature by George Engleheart. For the study: a George III mahogany secretaire bookcase with astragal-glazed doors and a fitted writing drawer (lot 100), three 18th and early 19th-century silver snuff and patch boxes (lot 85), and an articulated Continental silver fish that doubles as a snuff or spice box (lot 502).

For the Brummell shelf

Beau Brummell turns up in the salerooms more often than you might expect. Bonhams once sold a letter of his, probably written in exile, thanking his friend Broadwood for a gift of snuff, framed with a lacquer snuff box.

Toovey's in West Sussex sold a letter to him from the 6th Duke of Argyll, on paper watermarked 1816, the year Brummell fled his creditors to Calais.

Not an auction but worth knowing: a first edition of Captain William Jesse's two-volume Life of George Brummell (1844), still the founding biography, is offered by Robin Rare Books of Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, in three-quarter leather.

The week at a glance

• Sunday 1 November, Monaco: Monaco Legend, Exclusive Timepieces, second session from 2.30pm CET. The first in-house Patek Philippe 2499 (lot 234).
• Saturday 7 November, Geneva: Phillips Geneva Watch Auction XXIV, first session. The Tiffany Daytona (lot 45) and the platinum Eastern Arabic Daytona (lot 46).
• Monday 9 November, Boulogne-Billancourt: Millon, Buffet's Les roses claires (lot 323).
• Tuesday 10 November: deadline for French museums to request pre-emption of Dubreuillosaurus.
• 11 and 12 November, Edinburgh: Lyon & Turnbull, Five Centuries.
• Monday 16 November, New York: Sotheby's, Haring's Portrait of Grace Jones (lot 139), 7pm ET.
• Tuesday 17 November, New York: Phillips, untitled Haring (lot 15), 4.30pm ET.
• Wednesday 18 November, Paris: Millon at Drouot, Dubreuillosaurus valesdunensis (lot 203), 2pm.

For what makes a great watch worth owning in the first place, see watches, explained, and for where serious money is well spent, expensive but worth it.

Sources: Sotheby's; Associated Press; BBC News; The Guardian; Millon and Drouot lot notes; France 3 Normandie; Monaco Legend Auctions lot notes; Phillips lot notes; Lyon & Turnbull; Bonhams; Toovey's.