Dearly departed South Dakota cattle rancher Gary “Gus” Licking had a hunch that the small bone and teeth fragments he kept coming across on his 6,500-acre property might part of be something big. And, like a character in a Far Side cartoon, he was right: The dirt beneath his Harding County ranch hid one of the largest and most complete Tyrannosaurus rex skeletons ever discovered—a 38-foot (11.6-meter) long, nearly 12.5-foot (3.8-meter) tall monster now named “Gus” in his honor. Reconstructed from 183 fossilized bones and roughly 63% complete, Gus the T. rex hasn’t looked quite this good since he walked prehistoric North America during the Maastrichtian period, roughly 72 million to 66 million years ago. The dinosaur is now slated for auction at Sotheby’s in New York, where Gus debuted for public viewing on Wednesday ahead of bidding set to begin this July 14. Sotheby’s global head of science and natural history Cassandra Hatton said that it was “the completeness, the quality, the size, [and] the preservation” that made Gus stand out as a viable auction item, according to Reuters.
The opening bid for this towering slice of prehistory, per Sotheby’s online bidding registry, is set at $19 million. Please refrain from posting your Venmo in the comments. Old Wealth “What I think is really important for people to understand, when we talk about dinosaur fossils, is that they don’t come out of the ground complete,” Hatton told Reuters. “It takes highly specialized, careful, diligent, skilled people to recognize what they’re looking at, to tell the difference between a piece of rock and a piece of this animal.”
