The largest dinosaur skeleton ever auctioned in France, measuring 22 meters long, was sold on Saturday in the Paris region for 4.7 million euros (six million with costs), auction houses said.
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. “We are happy that the buyer intends to lend it to an institution”he added.
Made up of 75 to 80% of the original bones and approximately 150 million years old, the imposing specimen is the largest dinosaur ever put up for auction in France.
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 the sale took place.
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 to be restored.
The sales contract provides that the future owner undertakes to give paleontologists access to the dinosaur to study it. Before the sale, its value had been estimated between three and five million euros.
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