The skeleton, weighing 1,400 kilos and nicknamed “Shen”, was to be auctioned starting Friday, he explained. Christie’s, which did not disclose its price estimate or the identity of the seller. “The owner has decided to lease the specimen to a museum for public display,” the auction house said in a statement.
Several paleontologists had criticized this sale, and doubts were also raised about the authenticity of the fossil.
“Shen”, which is 4.6 meters tall and 12 meters long, is an adult male that lived about 67 million years ago. It was discovered in 2020 in Montana (United States).
According to the New York Times, the sales documents did not clearly specify that “Shen” was partially reconstructed with replicas of bones from another dinosaur. But, according to the newspaper, similarities were observed between the skull of “Shen” and that of ” Stan,” another Tyrannosaurus rex auctioned in 2020 by Christie’s for $31.8 million. In addition, the holder of the intellectual property rights of “Stan”, the Black Hills Institute of Geological Research, revealed that the owner of “Shen” had bought replicas of his dinosaur skeleton from him.
According to experts, it is extremely rare to find a complete dinosaur skeleton. A tyrannosaurus has about 380 bones in total, but according to Christie’sonly 80 of those that make up the skeleton of “Shen” are original.
Steve Brusatte, a paleontologist at the University of Edinburgh, had called the “Shen” sale project “bad news for science.”
“It’s sad that dinosaurs are becoming a collector’s item for the oligarchic class,” Brusatte told AFP.
And the American paleontologist Thomas Carr affirmed that these sales are “indisputably harmful to science”.