Photo: CARL DE SOUZA / Getty Images
Christie’s auction house announced that it will sell a skeleton of Deinonychus, better known as velociraptor for the movie Jurassic Park, at an estimated price of $4 million to $6 million dollars.
“It’s the dinosaur that everyone wants to see,” he said in an interview with the newspaper The New York Times, James Hyslop, head of Science and Natural History at Christie’s.
The skeleton, which was baptized as ‘Héctor’, dates from approximately 100 million years in the early Cretaceous period.
It was excavated by a commercial paleontologist, Jared Hudson, on private land in Wolf Canyon in Montana about nine years ago, and was later acquired by its current owner, who is anonymous, according to the catalog of sales.
Skeleton, 126 bones are real and the rest are reconstructed. The non-real bones are cast or 3D printed, making the creature something of a work of art and not just a fossil.
Most of the skull is reconstructed, which, according to Christie’s, is common in dinosaurs of this type and size.
Hector was exhibited at the Natural History Museum of Denmark for a year and a half , as of June 2022.
In 2020, a T. Rex skeleton, nicknamed ‘Stan’, collected a record $.8 million dollars, almost quadrupling its maximum estimate of $8 million dollars.
The buyer was anonymous until this year, when National Geographic reported that Abu Dhabi officials planned to include ‘Stan’ in a new natural history museum.
However, paleontologists have mixed opinions about the practice of auctioning dinosaur skeletons.
Some are fiercely opposed, as it opens the possibility that the specimens could fall into the hands of someone who has no interest in public and scientific access.
“It would be a great embarrassment to science and the public if this disappeared into an oligarch’s basement,” he told the NYT Steve Brusatte, Professor of Palaeontology and Evolution at the University of Edinburgh.
Such a case happened in 2017, when a baby tyrannosaurus rex fossil was auctioned on eBay. The owner put it up for sale for $3 million dollars without scientists being able to study it.
You may also like:
– Google brings huge dinosaurs to the world in augmented reality
1189640718– A rare blue diamond from 15 carats, the largest in the world, is auctioned at $57 millions of dollars
– Scientists say they can bring back the dinosaurs in five years