One of The Largest And Most Complete T-Rex Specimens Ever Discovered
- 6 hours ago
- 2 min read
Got deep pockets? This Tyrannosaurus rex could be yours for $30 million.
It's called Gus, and is a 12.5-foot tall, 38-foot long skeleton that took paleontologists three years to dig up. Auction house Sotheby’s values this giant prehistoric beast at $20 to $30 million - the highest estimate ever placed on a dinosaur. Cattle rancher Gary 'Gus' Licking found tell-tale bits of bone and teeth on his land in South Dakota and in 2021, Licking hired a team of professionals to excavate the site. Sadly, Licking died only one year into the excavation, so he never got to see the complete specimen. The team named the T. rex 'Gus' in his honor.
“This specimen took three years to excavate - with the team sometimes working for weeks straight without finding a thing,” says Thomas Heitkamp of Theropoda Expeditions. “The site was a complex fossil bed and preserved many fossils of the flora and fauna that comprised the larger Cretaceous ecosystem. We documented each stage with quarry maps, inventories, and collection data. In the end, our diligence paid off and we were delighted to discover what turned out to be a huge and incredibly complete T. rex specimen.”
In addition to the three summers it took to excavate, the team also had three years of lab work. In the lab, they carefully extracted the fossil from the rock before the bones could be prepared, cleaned, and identified.
The skeleton is made up of 183 fossil bones representing 82 percent of all of the dinosaur’s bones, including a well preserved skull, furcula (wishbone), and a completely represented pelvis. Its body is roughly 38-feet long and its skull alone is over four-feet long.
“It really does feel like tackling the world’s hardest puzzle, except we have to find all the pieces first,” said Heitkamp. “All those bones separated for 67 million years that we can now, almost magically, fit back together. There’s something deeply satisfying about that.”
Gus will be up for auction on 14 July during Sotheby’s Natural History auction. The fossil will also be on display to the public at Sotheby’s galleries in New York City beginning on 1 July.
In 2024, a nearly complete stegosaurus skeleton - nicknamed 'Apex' - sold at Sotheby’s in New York for a record US$44.6 million, the most ever paid for a fossil at auction. It was expected to fetch between $4 to $6 million. That may suggest that Gus may achieve more than Sotheby's top estimate of $30 million. OGN will let you know in due course.
The Most Perfectly Preserved Dinosaur of All Time: Nodosaurs roamed Earth during the late Jurassic Period, around 150 million years ago and, until recently, very little was known about this species, other than their heavily armored appearance, with spines and spikes to ward off giant predators.