T-Rex Fossil Gus Sells For Record 50.1 Million Dollars At Sothebys New York Auction

A Tyrannosaurus rex fossil nicknamed Gus sold for a record 50.1 million dollars at Sotheby's in New York on Tuesday, becoming the most expensive dinosaur skeleton ever sold at auction. The winning bid, placed by phone by an undisclosed buyer, came after a ten minute bidding war between seven bidders and blew past the presale estimate of 20 to 30 million dollars.

Gus measures about 38 feet long and 12.5 feet tall, with a skull spanning 54 inches, making it one of the largest T. rex specimens ever discovered. The skeleton includes 183 fossil bone elements and is roughly 61 percent complete by bone count, or 75 to 80 percent complete by mass, according to Sotheby's . It also preserves rarely found features such as a complete wishbone, a full pelvis and two well represented feet, along with healed fractures and bite marks suggesting the dinosaur survived past injuries.

The fossil was unearthed between 2021 and 2023 on a cattle ranch in South Dakota owned by Gary "Gus" Licking, after whom it is named. Licking died in 2022, a year into the excavation. The specimen comes from the Hell Creek Formation , the fossil bearing region spanning Montana, Wyoming and the Dakotas where the first T. rex bones were identified in 1902.

Gus surpasses the previous auction record of $44.6 million set by the stegosaurus Apex, bought by billionaire Ken Griffin in 2024, and the nearly $32 million paid for the T. rex Stan in 2020. The Society of Vertebrate Paleontology has urged the anonymous buyer to donate Gus to an accredited museum, warning that privately held fossils generally become inaccessible to scientific research.