A Tyrannosaurus rex skeleton from South Dakota has become the world’s most expensive fossil sold at auction, after fetching a record $50,130,000 at Sotheby’s in New York Tuesday. The skeleton, which is about 67 million years old, is nicknamed Gus after the late Gary ‘Gus’ Licking, a cattle rancher from Harding County, South Dakota, who owned the land where the specimen was found.

The Fossil

Gus the T. rex is 38 feet long and 12.5 feet tall, with a skull measuring 54 inches, which makes it one of the largest T. rexes ever found, according to Sotheby’s. It includes 183 fossil bone elements, making it about 61% complete by bone count, or 75% to 80% complete by mass.

The previous record for a fossil auction belonged to Apex the Stegosaurus, bought in 2024 by billionaire Ken Griffin for $44.6 million. The presale estimate for Gus was between $20 and $30 million. The winning bid was placed over the phone.

Scientific Significance

Paleontologists generally believe that once a fossil ends up in private hands, it is lost to science. Scientific journals will only publish research conducted on specimens held in publicly accessible collections; if a fossil is privately held, studies can’t be reliably reproduced, an important standard for verifying scientific findings.

Gus has many features that made it interesting both to scientists and prospective buyers. The skull has about 82% of the original bones represented, and the skeleton includes rarely found components such as the wishbone, a complete pelvis and both feet. Sotheby’s said only one other specimen is known to have two well-represented feet. Gus reportedly also shows bite marks and evidence of fractures that the dinosaur survived.

Original reporting: KTVZ (Central Oregon) — read the source article.