NEW YORK – Sotheby’s auction house announced it has sold for $6.1 million the complete skeleton of a dinosaur that lived in the late Cretaceous, the only one of its kind available on the market for private collectors.
This dinosaur, called Gorgosaurus, is a relative of the Tyrannosaurus Rex but faster and smaller, about three meters tall and more than six long, and only about 20 specimens of that species have been found, so its auction has caused controversy among scientists.
The buyer, who is currently anonymous, paid $6.1 million including commissions at a Sotheby’s natural-history auction in New York, a figure midway through the $5 million to $8 million range for the which the fossil was offered.
The auction house pointed out as a curiosity that this specimen does not have a nickname and that its new owner will have the right to choose one.
The passing into private hands of the unique skeleton, found in 2018 in the state of Montana (northwestern United States), has been criticized by some scientists, who point to the growing commercialization of fossils and the loss that it can mean for paleontological research.
However, the buyer may have been a museum or institution, as has happened on other occasions.
Sotheby’s has a long history of selling dinosaur fossils and in 1997 it was the first to offer a complete skeleton, the famous Tyrannosaurus Rex known as “Sue”, which sold for $8.36 million to the Field Museum in Chicago, where can be visited.
The record is held by “Stan”, a Tyrannosaurus Rex auctioned for 31.8 million dollars in 2020 and whose buyer was revealed this year by National Geographic: a natural history museum that is being built in Abu Dhabi and will open its doors in 2025.
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