A Tyrannosaurus rex skeleton from South Dakota has become the world’s most expensive fossil sold at auction, after fetching a record $50,130,000 at Sotheby’s in New York Tuesday.
The skeleton, which is about 67 million years old, is nicknamed Gus after the late Gary ‘Gus’ Licking, a cattle rancher from Harding County, South Dakota, who owned the land where the specimen was found. He died in 2022, one year into the excavation of the fossil.
Gus the T. rex is 38 feet long and 12.5 feet tall, with a skull measuring 54 inches, which makes it one of the largest T. rexes ever found, according to Sotheby’s. It includes 183 fossil bone elements, making it about 61% complete by bone count, or 75% to 80% complete by mass.
Like many other T. rex skeletons, Gus comes from the Hell Creek Formation, a legendary geological boneyard that stretches across Montana, Wyoming and the Dakotas. One of the first skeletons of T. rex was found there in 1902, and the name T. rex was given to the species based on fossils unearthed in this area.
The previous record for a fossil auction belonged to Apex the Stegosaurus, bought in 2024 by billionaire Ken Griffin for $44.6 million. It is currently halfway through a 4-year loan at New York’s Museum of Natural History.
