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Gorgosaurus: Ancient dinosaur skeleton sells for $6m at auction - BBC News
A rare ancient dinosaur skeleton has been sold in the US to an unknown buyer for just over $6m (£5m).
It was offered up by Sotheby’s and sold at the firm’s natural history auction in New York City on Thursday.
The fossil is that of a Gorgosaurus - a distant relative of the infamous and deadly Tyrannosaurus rex - that was discovered in 2018.
The anonymous buyer will have the unique opportunity to bestow a nickname on the one-time apex predator.
The sale is the second-ever of a fossilised dinosaur skeleton auctioned by Sotheby’s. The first, a T-rex nicknamed Sue, was sold to Chicago’s Field Museum in 1997 for $8.36m. …
… The fossil was discovered on private land in the US state of Montana. It has 79 bone elements, stands 10ft (3m) tall and is 22ft long. …
A farm in England was the unlikely source of a Jurassic jackpot: a treasure trove of 183 million-year-old fossils. On the outskirts of Gloucestershire in the Cotswolds, beneath soil that is currently trampled under the hooves of grazing cattle, researchers recently uncovered the fossilized remains of fish, giant marine reptiles called ichthyosaurs, squids, insects and other ancient animals dating to the early part of the Jurassic period (201.3 million to 145 million years ago).
Of the more than 180 fossils logged during the dig, one of the standout specimens was a three-dimensionally preserved fish head that belonged to Pachycormus, an extinct genus of ray-finned fishes. The fossil, which researchers found embedded in a hardened limestone nodule poking out of the clay, was exceptionally well preserved and contained soft tissues, including scales and an eye. The 3D nature of the pose of the specimen’s head and body was such that the researchers couldn’t compare it to any other previous find.
“The closest analogue we could think of was Big Mouth Billy Bass,” said Neville Hollingworth, a field geologist with the University of Birmingham who discovered the site with his wife, Sally, a fossil preparator and the dig’s coordinator. “The eyeball and socket were well preserved. Usually, with fossils, they’re lying flat. But in this case, it was preserved in more than one dimension, and it looks like the fish is leaping out of the rock,” Hollingworth told Live Science. …
