T. Rex fossil sells for record $50.1 million at NY auction

One of the largest and most complete Tyrannosaurus Rex fossils ever found sold for a record $50.1 million at a Sotheby’s auction in New York.

The fossil, nicknamed “Gus,” was the most valuable dinosaur ever offered at auction, with an estimate of $20 million to $30 million, and was the subject of a ten-minute bidding war, according to the live stream of the event.

Sotheby’s celebrated the milestone, emphasizing that “Gus” is the “most expensive” dinosaur ever sold, having achieved a “world record.”

The identity of the new owner of the skeleton, discovered and collected between 2021 and 2023 at an excavation site in South Dakota and dating back to the Late Cretaceous period, approximately 67 million years ago, is not yet known.

The previous record was held by the Stegosaurus ‘Apex,’ which sold for $44.6 million at Sotheby’s in 2014 to financier Ken Griffith, who loaned it to the American Museum of Natural History in New York.

In recent decades, dinosaur fossils have been appearing at auctions with increasingly higher prices, much to the concern of paleontologists, who maintain that their place is in research centers, not private collections.