Sotheby's has valued a T. rex fossil known as Gus at $30 million ahead of Tuesday's annual auction. The specimen could become the most expensive dinosaur ever sold.
The fossil was discovered in Badlands country in South Dakota and lived around 67 million years ago. Thomas Heitkamp said he and the team that found Gus spent three years carefully excavating it.
Sotheby's and Sue
Gus is appearing nearly 30 years after Sotheby's held a natural history auction in 1997 that included a dinosaur for the first time. Sue the Tyrannosaurus Rex sold that year for $8 million to the Field Museum in Chicago, setting the benchmark Gus is now being measured against.
Cassandra Hatton, global head of natural history at Sotheby's, described the lengths fossil hunters go to in the search for dinosaurs. Her auction house is presenting Gus as a rare specimen in a market that has grown around major natural history sales.
Dr Fiann Smithwick on decay
Dr Fiann Smithwick, an independent palaeontologist, said fossils begin to deteriorate once they leave the ground. "Suddenly when they're out of the ground, they're out of equilibrium, and that normally means they start to decay, fall apart." She has spent over the past 20 years collecting and preserving fossils.
The sale also sits inside a wider argument over where scientifically important fossils belong. Auctioneers argue fossil hunters should be rewarded for finding dinosaurs lost to science, while scientists argue specimens of this importance should be reserved for museums rather than private buyers.
Gus now goes to auction with a price tag that could push it past every dinosaur sale before it. The final figure will show whether the market treats one of the most complete T. rex specimens ever found as a trophy or a museum piece.
