Owning a piece of dinosaur history is looking to get especially pricey. This week, a Tyrannosaurus rex skeleton nicknamed “Gus” became the most expensive dinosaur fossil ever sold at auction.
On Tuesday, Gus was sold at the NYC-based auction house Sotheby’s for an astounding $50.1 million. The sale, made to a currently unknown buyer, shatters the previous record for a dinosaur auction set just two years ago. Experts worry, however, that the private purchase will prevent further study of this truly unique specimen.
Gus the record-breaker
Gus was discovered in South Dakota five years ago by the company Theropoda Expeditions on the property of cattle rancher Gary “Gus” Licking. The property was located within the Hell Creek formation, a vast region stretching across Montana, Wyoming, and the Dakotas already known to contain a rich bounty of fossils from the late Cretaceous period right before dinosaurs went extinct. Licking sadly passed away before the dinosaur was fully excavated from the area in 2023, though the T. rex fossil was given the same nickname in his honor.
By bone fossil count, Gus is about 61% complete. And though it isn’t the most intact T. rex skeleton ever found, Gus does have some special things going for it. For starters, it’s one of the largest dinosaurs of its kind ever unearthed, measuring 38 feet long and standing 12.5 feet tall, according to Sotheby’s. Its skull alone is 54 inches long. Gus is also notable for containing several gastralia, free-floating bones located in its abdominal wall. Only certain living reptiles, such as crocodiles, have these types of bones today.
South Dakota law dictates that any fossil found on private property belongs to the landowner, meaning it could be auctioned off by Licking’s estate. Gus has taken the throne of the most expensive T. rex skeleton ever auctioned from Stan, which was similarly discovered in South Dakota and sold for $31.8 million in October 2020. It also surpasses the $44.6 million paid for a Stegosaurus skeleton ‘Apex’ in 2024.
Worries about research
As cool as it might be to own a dinosaur skeleton, scientists worry that Gus could effectively be lost to science forever now that it’s likely fallen into the hands of a private buyer.
Though some independent researchers have reportedly examined Gus, according to Theropoda Expeditions, no formal research has been published on the skeleton as of yet. And scientists generally only study dinosaurs that can be publicly accessed, since this allows studies to be reliably reproduced—a crucial part of verifying a team’s findings.
“If this specimen goes to a private individual, it may or may not ever be seen by the public again,” Stuart Sumida, a professor of biology at California State University, San Bernardino, and president of the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology, told CNN this week. He added: “Not only that, it will never be subjected to actual proper scientific study—no reputable journal in the world will publish a scientific study based on something that’s not held in the public trust.”
There is perhaps a potential silver lining, though. It’s possible the buyer, whoever they are, may eventually decide to loan the fossil to a museum. Something similar seems to have happened to the T. rex fossil Stan, which went missing for several years after its sale before it returned to the public eye as part of an exhibit at the Natural History Museum Abu Dhabi that opened in late 2025.
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