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A vast, fossilized Tyrannosaurus rex nicknamed Gus sold at Sotheby’s in New York on Tuesday for $50.1m with fees (£37.4m) to a phone bidder – making it the most valuable dinosaur fossil sold at auction.
It also sold well above a pre-sale estimate of $20m to $30m (£15m to £22.4m).
The skeleton, judged to be one of the largest and most complete ever unearthed, was excavated on a ranch in Harding county, South Dakota, by the commercial fossil outfit Theropoda Expeditions.
Gus – which takes its name from Gary “Gus” Licking, owner of the land where the skeleton was discovered and excavated between 2021 and 2023 – had been the subject of scientific debate in the days leading up to the auction over claims that selling it into private hands could limit palaeontological research.
With its impressive dagger-like teeth and behemoth size, and its being “mounted in a predatory pose”, Gus is believed to be 67m years old.
It stands at 3.8 metres (12.5ft) tall and has been an attraction at the auction house’s new headquarters in New York.
The skeleton’s head is so large and heavy that it is not actually mounted on Gus’s skeleton. It instead has been sitting in the lobby of Sotheby’s Breuer building as a stark reminder that brutalist architecture is no match for the brutalism of a T-Rex bite which Sotheby’s described as “huge teeth displayed within the gaping jaws.”
A reproduction head is fitted on the skeleton itself.
In Sotheby’s sale prospectus, the auction house said it was listing Gus as a “monumental item” that would, “in our opinion, require special handling or shipping services due to size or other physical considerations”.
Gus – lot 20 in Tuesday’s auction – was presented by Sotheby’s as “an outstanding exhibition-ready mounted skeleton”. Beside its height, the auction house listed a body length of approximately 38ft, a skull length of 54in and a femur length of 50.39in. That cemented “Gus” as “one of the largest T rex ever found,” Sotheby’s said.
The auctioneer said the skeleton contained 183 fossil bone elements, plus 30 of the 32 rarely found – much less mounted – gastralia (belly ribs). Those figures make Gus approximately 61% complete by bone count, 75 to 80% complete in terms of bone mass – while having an “exceptionally preserved skull” that includes all six dentitions.
The skeleton also reveals some aspects of the life Gus lived on the hills of South Dakota, including a number of pathologies. Gus shows “signs of tyrannosaurid bite marks to the skull bones and right dentary, as well as to several post-cranial elements, all sustained by either combat or postmortem scavenging, in addition to injuries which occurred during the life of the individual, with fractured and healed bones discernible in several ribs and gastralia”.
The sale beats the previous record for a dinosaur fossil at auction. A stegosaurus called Apex held the record as of Tuesday, having sold at a Sotheby’s auction in 2024 for $44.6m.
Prior to auction, palaeontologists worried that sales like Gus could damage their studies by placing dinosaur skeletons out of the reach of academic institutions.
“The current trend towards dinosaur fossils being marketed and sold like rare artworks at vast prices by auction houses is very concerning, as is the idea of buying dinosaur fossils as a status symbol or a commodity,” professor Richard Butler, a vertebrate palaeontolgist at England’s University of Birmingham, told the Guardian.
“A fossil not in a recognised museum collection cannot be studied and is therefore lost to research. Fossils have been bought and sold for hundreds of years, but prices are increasingly out of the reach of museums, much to the detriment of science.”
Professor Stephen Brusatte, of the University of Edinburgh in Scotland, agreed. “As this dinosaur was found in the USA, and in America you can do what you want with what you find on your land, the auction looks to be legal,” he said. “But as a scientist, it still concerns me.”
In some countries, such as Brazil or Mongolia, all fossils belong to the state.
