Gus the Tyrannosaurus rex Sets a New Auction Record as Fossil Prices Soar
A Tyrannosaurus rex skeleton nicknamed Gus sold for just over $50 million at Sotheby’s in New York, setting a new benchmark for dinosaur fossils at auction and underscoring how aggressively the natural history market has expanded. The hammer price reached $43 million, and buyer’s fees pushed the total above $50 million.
Excavated in South Dakota’s Hell Creek Formation between 2021 and 2023, Gus is unusually complete: about 61 percent of the skeleton was recovered. Reconstructed in a predatory pose, with the head turned and one foot slightly raised, the specimen measured 38 feet long and stood 12 feet high. In the Breuer building, the mounted skeleton made a striking case for the scale and theatrical appeal that now drive this corner of the market.
The sale also extends a rapid run of record-setting fossil results. In 2024, Ken Griffin’s Stegosaurus, Apex, sold for $44 million, while a 66-million-year-old Triceratops called Trey brought $5.55 million in March on Joopiter. Christie’s sold the T. rex Stan for $31.8 million in 2020; Stan is now on view at Abu Dhabi’s new Natural History Museum.
That momentum has drawn commercial paleontologists, who are often hired by private landowners to excavate fossils. Gus was unearthed by a team led by Thomas Heitkamp of Theropoda Expeditions on property owned by the late rancher Gary “Gus” Licking.
For museums and researchers, the market’s rise carries a more complicated cost. In earlier decades, major dinosaur discoveries were more likely to enter public collections, as Sue did when Sotheby’s sold the first T. rex ever offered at auction in 1997 to the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago, with support from corporations, charities, and individual donors. Today, scientists say even leading institutions can be priced out.
Susannah Maidment, a dinosaur researcher at the Natural History Museum in London, told the BBC that museums are increasingly being shut out of access to important fossils. Stuart Sumida, president of the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology, put the concern more bluntly: “If you sell something, it’s generally lost to science.”
As fossil prices climb, the question is no longer only who can afford a dinosaur. It is who gets to study it, and for how long.
