A rare Tyrannosaurus rex skeleton nicknamed Gus sold for a record-breaking NZ$85.7 million at an auction held by Sotheby’s in New York, making it the most expensive dinosaur ever sold.
The skeleton stood almost four metres tall and was considered one of the most complete T. rex specimens ever discovered.
Gus was originally dug up on a ranch in South Dakota in 2021, with the excavation taking three summers to complete because the ground was frozen for much of the year. Experts then spent another three years carefully piecing the skeleton back together in a laboratory.
Over sixty percent of the original bones were recovered, and scientists even found bite marks and broken ribs that suggested Gus may have fought with other dinosaurs during its life.
The sale beat the previous dinosaur record, set by a stegosaurus skeleton named Apex, which sold for around NZ$76.3 million in 2024. The buyer of Apex later lent the fossil to a museum in New York for public display, and many dinosaur fans were hopeful that Gus’s new owner might do something similar.
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