Three Dinosaur Fossils Are Up For Grabs At This New York Art Gallery

At Spazio Amanita's Bowery space, three Maiasaura skeletons are sharing the room with a rare John Chamberlain sculpture in an exhibition that treats fossils less as curiosities than as objects with market, scientific, and sculptural weight.“Land Before Time: Three Dinosaurs and a Gondola” is on view through August 9.

The fossils are the exhibition's central draw. Together, they include a 62 percent complete juvenile, an 85 percent complete adolescent, and a 68 percent complete adult - a trio that the gallery says makes this the first public presentation of a full Maiasaura growth cycle. The species is especially significant in paleontology because it helped establish that some dinosaurs cared for their young.

The fossils were sourced through Tucson-based Granada Gallery, which has been excavating in Montana's Two Medicine region since 2019. Granada's co-founder, Garrett Goldsmith, said the business has become vertically integrated: it acquires land in fossil-rich areas of the American West, then handles excavation, mounting, and retail in-house. Under U.S. federal law, fossils found on private land belong to the landowner, a legal framework that has helped shape the market around these specimens.

Spazio Amanita chose the fossils in part because they were available at the right moment, but also because of their visual kinship with Chamberlain's compressed, skeletal forms. The gallery sought one of Chamberlain's lesser-known“Gondola” sculptures, and ultimately installed“Gondola Marianne Moore” beside the adult and juvenile fossils. Chamberlain titled each of his gondolas after American writers; this one bears the name of Marianne Moore.

Only the dinosaur fossils are for sale, and the gallery declined to disclose prices. Goldsmith said there has been strong private and institutional interest, while also noting that fossil sales tend to move more slowly than painting sales and are subject to greater scrutiny than they once were. The result is a show that places paleontology inside the language of contemporary display, where scientific rarity and market appetite now meet in the same room.

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