Skeleton of a T-rex sold for almost five million euros

Nearly 300 Tyrannosaurus rex bones unearthed from three sites in the United States, and assembled into a single skeleton, sold on Tuesday for almost five million euros at an auction in Switzerland, below the expected price.

Made in an open-mouthed pose, the T. rex skeleton, 11.6 meters long and 3.9 meters high, sold for 4.8 million Swiss francs at the Koller auction house in Zurich, coming in below the 5 million to 8 million francs expected for the deal.

The T. rex skeleton, named “Trinity,” was constructed from bones recovered from three sites in the Hell Creek and Lance Creek formations of Montana and Wyoming between 2008 and 2013.

At the auction, the skull was exposed next to the auctioneer’s table and, according to the auction house, it is a “particularly rare” and very well preserved piece, comprising the “original bone material” more than half of the restored skeleton.

“That could be why the purists didn’t accept it,” said the auction house’s marketing director, Karl Green, acknowledging that the piece sold for “a fair price” and revealing that he hoped the dinosaur would be shown in a public place. “When dinosaurs died out in the Jurassic or Cretaceous periods, they often lost their heads during deposition (from the remains in the rocks). In fact, most dinosaurs are found without a skull,” said Nils Knoetschke, a scientific consultant quoted in the auction catalog. .

T. rex roamed the Earth between 65 and 67 million years ago. A study published two years ago in the journal “Science” estimated that around 2.5 billion dinosaurs lived on Earth.

The two areas from which Trinity’s bones were recovered were also the source of other auctioned T. rex skeletons, according to Koller: Chicago’s Field Museum of Natural History purchased “Sue” more than a quarter century ago and ” Stan” has been sold for three years.

Two years ago, a triceratops skeleton, which Guinness World Records declared the world’s largest, known as “Big John”, sold for 6.6 million euros to a private collector at an auction in Paris.