The largest dinosaur skeleton ever put up for auction, measuring 22 meters long, was sold on Saturday in Dampierre-en-Yvelines for more than six million euros, AFP learned from auction houses.
The anonymous buyer is a collector who said he wanted to entrust the skeleton of an apatosaurus, a giant herbivore, to a museum, indicate the Collin du Bocage and Barbarossa houses.
“This auction is one of the highest made for a dinosaur skeleton in France”welcomed Olivier Collin du Bocage.
Made up of 75 to 80% of the original bones, the imposing specimen is the largest dinosaur ever put up for auction.
The skeleton of the herbivorous giant, which weighed around twenty tonnes during its lifetime and probably reached the age of 45, spent the summer in the orangery of the castle of Dampierre-en-Yvelines, around fifty kilometers to the southwest of Paris, where Kings Louis XIII, Louis XIV and Louis XV stayed.
The skeleton of the apatosaurus nicknamed Vulcain, presented at the castle of Dampierre-en-Yvelines, in Yvelines, July 10, 2024 / STEPHANE DE SAKUTIN / AFP/Archives
The remains of this apatosaurus, nicknamed Vulcan, were discovered in 2018 in Wyoming, in the United States, where the law allows individuals to acquire concessions in the hope of excavating prehistoric bones.
The excavations took place between 2019 and 2021 and were financed by a French investor. The fossil, which includes 300 bones, was then shipped to France for processing.
This restoration work was carried out over two years by the company Paleomoove Laboratory in its workshop in the Luberon, in the South-East.
The sales contract provides that the future owner undertakes to give paleontologists access to the dinosaur to study it.
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