Almost thirty years after a dinosaur fossil was first put up for auction by the famous auction house Sotheby's, a new fossil could make history as the most-expensive assembly of dinosaur remains we've ever seen. Gus, one of the most complete T-Rex fossils collected by scientists, has been valued by auctioneers at $30 million.
This doesn't automatically qualify Gus as being the most-expensive dinosaur fossil ever, but he's not far off. As per the BBC, the current record holder is a Stegosaurus called Apex, which sold back in 2024 for $44.6 million, eleven times its initial valuation. Right now, you can't even put a bid in for Gus unless you want to spend at least $19 million, a price that's much too steep for scientists and museums looking to study the fossil and put it on display.
It's kicked off a debate among scientific communities about whether such fossils should be reserved for scientists alone, or whether the fossil hunters have a right to earn a great amount of wealth from their searches. "The people that look for these fossils will spend months out in the field with tents and their food in their backpacks and they're camping out in the middle of nowhere with the rattlesnakes and the bugs and the mountain lions," says Cassandra Hatton, global head of natural history at Sotheby's.
At a price of $30 million, there are people who can afford to buy Gus, but they're more likely to be super-rich individuals than museums. Owning a near-complete T-Rex fossil certainly sounds like something befitting a billionaire, but this would then rob scientists of the chance to study the fossil and gain vital information from the dinosaur.