At a Sotheby’s auction in New York, an anonymous buyer paid $50.1 million for a specimen of Tyrannosaurus rex. It is the most expensive dinosaur fossil ever sold at auction, on July 14, 2026, surpassing the 44.6 million in 2024 for the Apex stegosaurus and the 31.8 million in 2020 for the Tyrannosaurus known as Stan. The fossil is called Gus, in honor of Gary Licking, nicknamed “Gus”, a rancher from Harding County in South Dakota where the animal was discovered in 2021. Licking died in 2022, during the five-year excavation and restoration. The initial estimate at auction was between 20 and 30 million: the final price almost doubled it.
Gus measures 3.8 meters high and 11.5 meters long, made up of 183 bony elements: approximately 61% of the skeleton by number of bones, but between 75 and 80% by mass. The remains include an exceptionally preserved skull, both feet, a rarity shared with only one other known specimen, and the furcula, the wishbone homologous to the wishbone of birds. The skull was so heavy that it looked like a lightweight reproduction in the auction room. The animal dates back 67 million years, from the Hell Creek geological formation.
The sale sparked immediate scientific reactions. There Society of Vertebrate Paleontology declared that such significant fossils should remain in public museums: when a fossil enters a private collection, paleontologists will find it increasingly difficult to study it, unlike public bodies. A similar precedent from a few weeks ago was the sale in France of an example of Elasmosaurus. The company’s president-elect, Kristi Curry Rogers, said she hoped the new owner would donate Gus to a museum, as has happened in the past with other private acquisitions. This is the case of the aforementioned Apex, the stegosaurus of 2024, loaned to the American Museum of Natural History; and Sue, the first T-Rex at auction in 1997, now at the Field Museum in Chicago.
