Rare composite T-rex skeleton sells for $5.3 million in Swiss auction

Rare composite T-rex skeleton sells for $5.3 million in Swiss auction. At an auction held in Switzerland on Tuesday, a T-rex skeleton composed of nearly 300 bones excavated from three different sites in the United States was sold for 4.8 million francs ($5.3 million), which was lower than the expected price, Fox News reported.

The skeleton, measuring 38 feet long and 12.8 feet high and posed with an open mouth, fell short of the estimated selling price of 5 million to 8 million francs at the Koller auction house in Zurich. The composite skeleton, which was part of a 70-lot auction, was on display throughout the auction, with the skull placed near the auctioneer’s podium.

According to Karl Green, the auction house’s marketing director, “It could be that it was a composite — that could be why the purists didn’t go for it. It’s a fair price for the dino. I hope it’s going to be shown somewhere in public.”

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The purchaser of the complete Tyrannosaurus rex skeleton was described by Green as a “European private collector”. The final sale, which included the “buyer’s premium” and fees, amounted to 5.5 million Swiss francs (about $6.1 million), according to Koller.

The composite T-rex, named “Trinity”, was created from fossils found in three sites in Montana and Wyoming between 2008 and 2013. Over half of the restored skeleton was comprised of “original bone material”, while the auction house highlighted the skull as a rare and well-preserved feature.

“When dinosaurs died in the Jurassic or Cretaceous periods, they often lost their heads during deposition (of the remains into rocks). In fact, most dinosaurs are found without their skulls,” said Nils Knoetschke, a scientific adviser who was quoted in the auction catalogue. “But here we have truly original Tyrannosaurus skull bones that all originate from the same specimen.”

Around 65 to 67 million years ago, T-rex existed on Earth, with an estimated 2.5 billion dinosaurs of the species ever having lived. T-rex has become an object of public fascination, due in part to popular Hollywood films such as the “Jurassic Park” franchise.

The same regions that yielded the bones for Trinity, the composite T-rex, were also the sources of the specimens for Sue and Stan, two other T-rex skeletons that were sold at auction in the past. Sue was bought by the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago for $8.4 million over 25 years ago, while Stan was sold for almost $32 million three years ago.

In 2019, a Paris auction sold a triceratops skeleton named “Big John”, which was declared the world’s biggest by Guinness World Records, for 6.6 million euros ($7.2 million) to a private collector