Auctions Facts

Nancy Carlson bought a plain bag at a government surplus auction for $995. It turned out to be Neil Armstrong's Apollo 11 lunar sample bag - still containing actual moon dust from the first landing. NASA demanded it back. A federal judge ruled Carlson was the legal owner. She sold it at Sotheby's for $1.8 million. The moon was in the clearance bin.

A family bought a small white bowl for $3 at a yard sale in upstate New York in 2007 and kept it on their living room shelf for six years. It turned out to be a 1,000-year-old Northern Song Dynasty "Ding" bowl - one of only two known to exist. It sold at Sotheby's for $2.2 million. The other one is in the British Museum.

Jessica Vincent paid $3.99 for a swirled glass vase at a Goodwill in Hanover County, Virginia. She recognized the "Venini" signature on the bottom and posted it to an Italian glass collecting Facebook group - experts identified it as a rare Carlo Scarpa Pennellate vase from 1942, one of only two known in that color. It sold at Wright auction in Chicago for $107,100.

A Stegosaurus skeleton nicknamed "Apex" sold at Sotheby's on July 17, 2024 for $44.6 million - the most ever paid for a fossil at auction. Sotheby's had estimated it at $4 to $6 million; bidding ended in 15 minutes. Of its 319 visible bones, 254 are original fossil. The rest are sculpted.

London Bridge, the real one from the Thames, now stands in the Arizona desert. In 1968, developer Robert McCulloch bought it for .46 million. Workers numbered every exterior granite block, shipped them 10,000 miles through the Panama Canal, and rebuilt the bridge over a canal in Lake Havasu City. It reopened in 1971 and still draws tourists today.

Stonehenge was privately owned until 1918. A barrister named Cecil Chubb bought it at a Salisbury auction in 1915 for £6,600 - by some accounts because he got carried away while there to buy dining chairs. Three years later he gave it to the British nation. The government made him a baronet.