Sold for almost 5 million euros: what will become of Vulcain, the largest dinosaur skeleton ever sold?

The auction attracted many curious people this Saturday, November 16, to the Château de Dampierre-en-Yvelines. The attraction: a dinosaur skeleton twenty meters long, four meters high, nicknamed Vulcan. In front of the TF1 cameras, moved spectators were able to contemplate this apatosaurus, which seems to have been among the largest specimens of its time. “It looks like us, with a monstrous size, and that’s fabulous”says a man in the report above. “And then, what’s more, it’s a herbivore, so we’re at peace”laughs a woman.

It must be said that the opportunities to contemplate the 360 ​​intact bones of a specimen that lived around 145 million years ago are not that frequent. “This dinosaur is exceptional because it already has 80% of its original skeleton. It’s rare, it’s very rare”confirms Eric Mickeler, expert in natural history.

“We extracted the bones from the rock”

It was on the Morrison geological formation, in the western United States, that the skeleton resurfaced after so many years. Vulcan was taken out piece by piece, over three years, by European and American paleontologists, then reconstituted in a French laboratory. “We received large plastered blocks of rock, some weighing more than a ton. (…) Then we extracted the bones from the rock, and then we restored and consolidated them”says Nicolas Tourment, founder of the Paleomoove laboratory.

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From now on, research continues to try to confirm a hypothesis: Vulcan would have belonged to a species of dinosaur never before studied. For now, the beast was finally sold for 4.7 million euros this Saturday, by an anonymous buyer who promised to entrust it to a museum.