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Wednesday, August 19, 2009

Money "Always bet on T. rex."

Posted by Grant Brissey on Wed, Aug 19, 2009 at 9:31 AM

You know we have a budget crisis when...

One of the largest and most complete Tyrannosaurus rex skeletons ever discovered is set to go on the auction block in Las Vegas in October.

The 66 million-year-old fossil was found 22 years ago in South Dakota and has come to be known as Samson. It is 40 feet long and 15 feet tall and consists of around 170 bones, more than half of a complete skeleton.

“In the last 110 years, there’s been a total of 46 specimens found of Tyrannosaurus rex of which this is the third most complete and has the finest skull,” said Tom Lindgren, who is co-director of natural history for the auction house Bonhams & Butterfields.

Is this normal?

Via wired.com.

Comments (4) RSS

Oldest First Unregistered On Registered On Add a comment

normal shmormal. wrong question.

The real question is why annoying wealthy private purchasers can buy a cool treasure like this in the first place, and then own it and make it so the rest of us can't ever look at it.

I hope some public institution can manage to buy it and exhibit it so all the other T Rexes and humans can have a look. (Yeah yeah yeah they would have to make a museum big enough for T Rexes to fit in. Then make T Rex pre-museum visit workbooks).

Posted by LuisitaPhD on August 19, 2009 at 10:14 AM

Maybe you could talk Dan into buying it. He can probably afford it.

Posted by Fifty-Two-Eighty

on August 19, 2009 at 10:18 AM

Perfectly normal. Sue, the most complete dino, was auctioned and bought by the Field Museum in Chicago with help from a donor and a corporate sponsor. And that was in relatively normal economic times, iirc.

Posted by eric sic on August 19, 2009 at 10:53 AM

The thing will probably end up in a museum like Sue and the Field Museum-- it's not like there's that many evil billionaires who would buy a complete dinosaur skeleton to put in their rumpus rooms. Although wait until the kids who grew up with dino-mania start becoming evil billionaires...

But what's really annoying about the high dollar dino sales is that a lot of farmers and ranchers out in dino country are starting to see fossils as their Jed Clampett-esque ticket to riches and are much more wary about letting paleontologists excavate and take stuff off their land for basically nothing.

Posted by Jk on August 19, 2009 at 11:26 AM