A 67 million-year-old Tyrannosaurus rex will go under the hammer in New York on Tuesday, with a pre-sale value of $30m that could make it the most expensive dinosaur fossil ever sold. The specimen, nicknamed Gus, was discovered in South Dakota’s Badlands country and named after the late Gary “Gus” Licking, the cattle rancher whose land yielded the remains. It took Thomas Heitkamp and his team three years of careful excavation to extract the fossil, working only during the field season. “You can only dig during the field season. So you have to wait till th…” explained Cassandra Hatton, global head of natural history at Sotheby’s.
The auction marks a stark shift from the first time a dinosaur appeared at Sotheby’s, in 1997, when the T. rex Sue sold for $8m to the Field Museum in Chicago. That event was a niche affair mostly attended by museums. Now, the super-rich are joining the hunt, feeding a growing debate among natural historians: should specimens of such scientific importance be reserved for museums and their scientists? Or should fossil hunters be rewarded for saving dinosaurs from a second extinction?
“A 67 million-year-old T. rex named Gus, valued at $30m, goes on sale at Sotheby's.”
“People die on excavations,” Hatton said, describing the lengths prospectors go to. “The people that look for these fossils will spend months out in the field with tents and their food in their backpacks and they’re camping out in the middle of nowhere with the rattlesnakes and the bugs and the mountain lions.”
But finding a fossil is only half the battle, said Dr Fiann Smithwick, an independent palaeontologist with 20 years of experience collecting and preserving fossils. “Suddenly when they’re out of the ground, they’re out of equilibrium, and that normally means they start to decay, fall apart.”
Gus has already been valued at $30m, but could fetch more, potentially surpassing the record for a dinosaur sale. The auction will test whether scientific value can compete with private wealth in the market for prehistoric treasures.