67-Million-Year Old T-Rex Skeleton To Be Auctioned In Europe Next Month

The first sale of a Tyrannosaurus-Rex skeleton in Europe will take place at an auction in Switzerland next month, the auction house said on Saturday.
The Trinity skeleton will be auctioned off on April 18 in Zurich, according to the Koller auction house.

According to the auction brochure, Trinity, which stands at a height of 3.9 metres (12.8 feet), is worth between six and eight million Swiss francs ($6.5-8.7 million). But Christian Link, in charge of natural history memorabilia at Koller, told AFP he believed that was a “very low estimate”.

Trinity, a well-preserved and expertly repaired dinosaur, is “one of the most stunning T-Rex skeletons in existence,” according to the auction house.

The auction would offer a complete T-Rex dinosaur skeleton of extraordinary grade for the first time in Europe and just the third time overall.

Koller cited a 2021 study published in the academic magazine Nature that claimed only 32 adult T-Rex skeletons, one of the biggest terrestrial carnivores ever to walk the Planet, had been discovered globally.

The bones from three T-Rex specimens were used to create the Trinity skeleton.

The auction catalogue stated that they were extracted between 2008 and 2013 from the Hell Creek and Lance Creek formations in Montana and Wyoming in the United States.

The two sites are known for the discoveries of two other significant T-Rex skeletons that have gone to auction: Sue went under the hammer in 1997 for $8.4 million, and Stan, which took the world-record hammer price of $31.8 million at Christie’s, in 2020.

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