Russell Crowe reveals he bought a £23,500 dinosaur head from Leonardo DiCaprio while drunk

'There was a bunch of vodka involved'

In something that would only ever happen if you were a wealthy Hollywood celebrity, Russell Crowe has revealed he once bought a £23,500 dinosaur skull from Leonardo DiCaprio when he was drunk.

“I bought it for my kids,” the Gladiator actor told Howard Stern on his SiriusXM Satellite show on Wednesday, “and you know, cut myself a little bit of slack here, there was a bunch of vodka involved in the transaction and it happened at Leonardo's house”.

Stern asked how the strange transaction came about, to which Crowe explained that DiCaprio had seen another dinosaur skull on the market that he really wanted, so was trying to sell the one he already owned.

“And I said, 'Well, I'll buy it',” Crowe recalls, “I said 'How much you want for it?'

"He was pretty cool about it, he said, 'Just give me what I paid for it', and I think he paid 30, 35 grand for it.”

When asked why he decided to make the purchase, which occurred in 2008, Crowe said that at the time, his children were fascinated with dinosaurs. “So I said, 'Here you go, here's one for the playroom’,” he explained. The 55-year-old actor couldn’t recall what kind of dinosaur it was.

The skull was sold in an auction for $65,000. (Sotheby's Australia)

In 2018, the actor sold the dinosaur head via Sotheby’s Australia as part of an auction called "Russell Crowe: The Art of Divorce" that was famously arranged to help Crowe fund his divorce from actor Danielle Spence.

Sotehby’s identified the skull as being from a Mosasaur and described it as a “fossil relative of the monitor lizard family, which includes the Komodo Drago, the Mosasaur was a giant, serpentine marine reptile, which was prevalent during the Late Cretaceous Period, approximately 65 million years ago.

“Mosasaurs were formidable hunters, with a double-hinged jaw and a flexible skull enabling them to eat their prey whole."

The auction consisted of 226 items in total, including several props used by Crowe in his most famous films, and raised more than $3.7m (£2.9m).

Crowe told Stern the skull had “almost doubled in value” since he sold it. Sothetby’s states that the item was sold for $65,000 (£51,129) at hammer price.