An almost intact skull. A skeleton that is about 65 percent complete. Anyone who has ever dreamed of having a tyrannosaurus rex in the living room has a unique opportunity. Today, the famous dinosaur fossil Stan is going up for auction in New York. Price tag? Between $ 6 and $ 8 million, auction house Christie’s estimates.
According to experts, Stan could just become the most expensive fossil ever. That is still T-rex Sue, for which $ 8.36 million was put up at auction in 1997 by a natural history museum in Chicago.
“But there is no second Stan,” said earth scientist and fossil expert Manuel Quiring. He works at online sales platform Catawiki, where experts such as Quiring oversee the auctions. Long before he started valuing fossils, he already knew Stan. The skeleton has featured in numerous scientific studies.
‘As if you are auctioning the Mona Lisa’
When Stan was found in the US state of South Dakota in 1987 by amateur paleontologist and namesake Stan Sacrison, he was the most complete T-rex ever with 199 bones found. In the more than three decades since, only four more complete T-rexes have been found.
In the 43-page tome to win over buyers, Christie’s writes that Stan is the T-rex that has probably been seen by most people. Casts of the fossil have been sold to dozens of museums by the commercial excavation company that owns it.
The highlight is the skull, according to paleontologists the most complete and best preserved of all T-rexes. There are even traces of prehistoric fights with conspecifics. “It’s a bit like auctioning the Mona Lisa. It is therefore difficult to predict how much Stan will yield,” says auction expert Quiring.
He does think that Christie’s estimate of the yield is “quite conservative”. Also because the fossil market has changed a lot since Sue’s auction in 1997. Rare fossils like Stan no longer automatically go to museums. Quiring sees it every day at Catawiki. Last month, the platform sold a triceratops horn to a private buyer for 7250 euros.
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