67-million-year-old Tyrannosaurus Rex skeleton sells for record ₹233 crore

A 67-million-year-old Tyrannosaurus Rex skeleton, nicknamed Stan after the palaeontologist who discovered it in 1987, sold for $31.8 million (₹233 crore) at an auction in New York. The sale set a new world record for any dinosaur fossil ever sold at auction. Standing 13 feet tall and 40 feet long, Stan is one of the most complete T Rex skeletons.

It’s rare that archaeologists find Tyrannosaur fossils as complete as Stan, according to Hyslop, and even rarer that such skeletons appear on the market. The last time a comparable specimen came to auction was in 1997, when a T. rex named Sue sold for $8.36 million — or nearly $13.5 million today, given the rate of inflation — to the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago.

Over the past two decades, researchers have theorized that punctures in Stan’s skull and fused neck vertebrae demonstrate that this Tyrannosaur was a warrior, one likely to have survived attacks from his own species. Scientists also estimate that the dinosaur would have weighed nearly 8 tons when it was alive, more than twice the weight of a modern African elephant.

Stan brought energy to an otherwise muted auction. Of the 59 works, four were withdrawn before the auction began; nine works failed to sell.