A Tyrannosaurus rex skeleton nicknamed Gus sold for a record $50.1 million at Sotheby’s in New York on Tuesday, becoming the most expensive dinosaur fossil ever auctioned, after a phone bidder whose identity remains unknown outbid six rivals in a 10-minute sale that pushed past its $30 million upper estimate with ease.
Gus is an adult T. rex standing 12.5 feet tall and 38 feet long, with 183 preserved fossil bone elements. Sotheby’s says the specimen is 61% complete by bone count and 67 million years old. It was discovered in 2021 on a cattle ranch in Harding County, South Dakota, belonging to Gary Licking, who died during the five-year excavation process and gave the fossil its nickname. Paleontologist Thomas Heitkamp led three summers of digging before years of lab preparation followed.
The sale shattered two records at once. It bested Sotheby’s own 2024 record of $44.6 million for a stegosaurus nicknamed Apex, purchased by hedge fund billionaire Ken Griffin, and the previous T. rex record of $31.8 million for a skeleton called Stan in 2020.
The Society of Vertebrate Paleontology immediately called on the anonymous buyer to donate Gus to a natural history museum, warning that privately owned fossils become unavailable to science. Vertebrate paleontologist Thomas Holtz of the University of Maryland noted that for a thousandth of the sale price, a small institution could fund two full seasons of fossil excavation.
