Nineteen million dollars is the floor. That’s the minimum anyone needs Tuesday just to open the bidding on Gus, a 38-foot Tyrannosaurus rex that Sotheby’s says is one of the largest and most complete specimens ever pulled out of the ground. By Tuesday night it could be the most expensive dinosaur ever sold.
Gus headlines Sotheby’s Natural History auction in New York, part of the house’s annual Geek Week sale alongside meteorites and an original Apple-1 computer. The pre-sale estimate runs $20 million to $30 million, which Sotheby’s and outlets covering the sale describe as the highest estimate ever placed on a dinosaur skeleton headed to auction. Bidding opens Tuesday, according to KOTA Territory News, which first reported the sale details out of the Black Hills region where Gus was found.
The skeleton takes its name from Gary “Gus” Licking, a South Dakota cattle rancher who kept turning up bone and tooth fragments on his 6,500-acre spread in Harding County and had a hunch they meant something. He was right. Beneath his land sat one of the largest Tyrannosaurus skeletons on record, buried in the Hell Creek Formation for roughly 67 million years. Licking died a year into the recovery effort; his widow, Dana, stayed with the project through to the auction, Gizmodo reported after speaking with the excavation team.
That team, commercial paleontologists from Theropoda Expeditions, spent three field seasons digging Gus out between 2021 and 2023. Excavation only happens once the ground thaws each spring and stops again when it freezes in the fall, so the crew spent another two years cleaning, cataloging and mounting the bones before the reconstruction was finished this year. The result stands 12½ feet tall and stretches nearly 38 feet nose to tail. It’s roughly 61% complete by bone count, an unusually high figure for a T. rex, with a well-preserved skull, rare belly ribs and a full pelvis. The bones themselves tell a violent story: healed fractures, and a bite mark on the skull that may have come from another tyrannosaur.
Fossil hunting has had an unusually busy stretch lately. A dinosaur skeleton sat forgotten in a museum drawer for four decades before researchers realized what they had, and paleontologists in Southeast Asia recently announced a newly identified species roughly the length of a cricket pitch. Gus stands out from both because of what happens to it next: not a museum shelf, but an auction floor.
“Gus is one of the largest and most complete T. rex ever found, 61% of the bones has been identified – in general you find half of the skeleton that’s a major scientific find.”
Cassandra Hatton, Sotheby’s global head of science and natural history
What Hatton calls a major scientific find, some scientists call a specimen they’ll never get their hands on. That tension isn’t new to the fossil market, but it keeps getting sharper as prices climb. Sotheby’s sold its first T. rex, Sue, for $8 million back in 1997, to Chicago’s Field Museum. In 2020, a T. rex named Stan went for $31.8 million against a guide price of just $6 million to $8 million. The current dinosaur-auction record belongs to Apex, a Stegosaurus that Sotheby’s sold in 2024 for $44.6 million to Citadel founder Ken Griffin, who later loaned it to the American Museum of Natural History.
| Specimen | Year | Sale price |
|---|---|---|
| Sue (T. rex) | 1997 | $8 million |
| Stan (T. rex) | 2020 | $31.8 million |
| Apex (Stegosaurus) | 2024 | $44.6 million |
| Gus (T. rex) | 2026 | est. $20–30 million |
Every entry on that list moved a fossil further from public science and closer to private wealth. Susannah Maidment, a dinosaur researcher at London’s Natural History Museum, has watched the trend with something closer to alarm than admiration.
“We’re already priced out of having access to many, many specimens.”
Prof. Susannah Maidment, Natural History Museum, London, quoted in coverage originally reported by the BBC
She calls the pattern “really problematic,” and not just because museums can’t compete with billionaires’ checkbooks. The bigger issue, she argues, is what happens to a fossil once it disappears into a living room or a corporate lobby. Serious science journals generally won’t publish research on specimens held in private hands. As far as the scientific literature is concerned, an unpublished private fossil might as well not exist. Researchers need to revisit bones for years, sometimes decades, to check earlier findings against new discoveries. A private owner can restrict that access, lose interest, or simply pass the specimen on to heirs who have no obligation to let anyone study it again.
Sotheby’s argues the opposite case: without commercial excavation, fossils like Gus never leave the ground. In reporting first published by the BBC, Hatton described months camping in Badlands country “with the rattlesnakes and the bugs and the mountain lions,” funded almost entirely by the diggers themselves. “It’s not billionaires digging them up,” she said. Her line for the whole enterprise: “They’re saving the dinosaurs from the second extinction.”
Both sides agree that recovering a fossil like Gus takes money most museums don’t have lying around, and someone has to pay the diggers. What they don’t agree on is who should own the result once the work is done. Maidment’s counterpoint is that dinosaur bones have started trading the way art does, valued for scarcity and prestige as much as for what they can teach anyone. Whether Tuesday’s buyer sees Gus as a scientific specimen or a trophy, the sale will set the next benchmark the market measures itself against, and paleontologists uneasy about the last several benchmarks aren’t likely to feel better about this one.
