He’s one of the largest and most complete T-Rex specimens ever discovered and you have a chance to own him…..if you have a lot of money.
He’s called ‘Gus’. Gus 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.
Credit: Matthew Sherman
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!
Gus will be up for auction on July 14th.
In 2024, a nearly complete Stegosaurus skeleton – nichnamed ‘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 the top estimate of $30 million.
Have a ‘Good News’ story for us? Text the Tbaytel Talk & Text Line at 807-223-5215 or email: mccarthy.richard@radioabl.ca to share some……Good News!
