You can own a real T Rex named Gus for £23,000,000

If you’ve ever thought that a Tyrannosaurus Rex would really complete your living room, do we have some good news for you.

The New York auction house Sotheby’s has put a near-complete fossil of the dinosaur up for action.

‘Gus’ will go under the hammer tomorrow morning. The minimum starting bid is $19million but Sotheby’s expects it to sell for up to $30million (about £22.5million).

The auction house says Gus is one of the largest and most complete T Rex specimens ever found, made of 183 bone parts.

The dino roamed what is now Harding County, the northwest corner of South Dakota, some 67million years ago.

The listing says: ‘Judging from the overall size and degree of bone development, it can be determined that Gus’ skeleton belonged to a very large, robust, adult individual.’

Some of the bones discovered suggest another T Rex sank its teeth into poor Gus, showing signs of bone fractures and healing.

The skeleton, which measures 38 feet long and 12.5 feet tall, was discovered in 2021.

A metatarsal from his foot was spotted sticking out of the ground by ranch-owner Gary ‘Gus’ Licking and his wife, Dana.

Texas company Theropoda Expeditions named Gus after Gary, who died aged 67 in 2022 during the evacuation process.

Cassandra Hatton, worldwide head of Sotheby’s Science & Natural History division, said in a video released by the company: ‘Gary had for years roamed around his 6,500 acre property and seeing T Rex teeth and little bits of fossils and such and he realised that there was probably something really important under the ground.’

She added that it took two years to assemble the ancient creature, mounting him in a predatory pose held up by rods above a steel platform.

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Gus was found in the Hell Creek Formation, which stretches South Dakota Montana, North Dakota and Wyoming, where dino bones are common.

Gary and Dana Licking were married in 1983 and lived on their ranch 11 miles west of Buffalo, according to his obituary.

Dana said she’s ‘grateful’ that the team assembled Gus, given the giant reptile could have been ‘lost’ forever.

‘To make it come to life takes a lot of love and care and dedication, and they stopped at nothing to make that happen,’ she added.

Thomas Heitkamp, president of Theropoda Expeditions, said his team camped out on Gary and Dana’s home for five months each year.

‘What is out in the hills is all that will ever exist, and finding it is critical to preserving it,’ he said.

‘You’re dealing with material that has been a part of the earth for a very, very long time and it has no interest in cooperating – it wants to stay there.’

‘Fossils shouldn’t be locked away in a rich person’s house’

This isn’t the first time a pile of old bones was up for sale. Sotheby’s flogged Sue the T Rex in 1997 for $8.4million.

Apex the stegosaurus is the most expensive dinosaur fossil ever sold at auction, for $44.6million, when it was expected to sell for just $4million.

The winning bidder for Apex in 2024 was Kenneth Griffin, a hedge fund billionaire.

While a T Rex nicknamed Stan, dubbed the ‘King of Dinosaurs’, fetched a record $31.8million in 2020.

But paleontologists and museum curators have criticised putting dinosaur fossils up for grabs, saying science is being priced out.

‘Dinosaur specimens are extremely rare and all are scientifically important because we have so few of them, professor Susannah Maidment, a researcher at the Natural History Museum in London, told Metro.

‘Yet they are increasingly being sold like pieces of art to private individuals who often consider them as assets rather than natural heritage.’

While some private donors have made their slices of pre-history available for scientists, they may end up re-selling or even destroying them.

‘They are lost to science,’ Maidment adds.

‘Amateur and commercial palaeontologists deserve to be recompensed for their work in finding, excavating and preparing fossils, but a valuation of $50million is profiteering off natural heritage that should be available for everybody to see, not locked away in a rich person’s house.’

There is, after all, a lot still to learn about one of the most famous dinosaurs.

Scientists have discovered that the Tyrannosaurus rex’s dagger-toothed maw was covered by plump lips.

These bloodthirsty carnivores were probably not covered in scary scales, either, instead sporting a coat of fluffy feathers.

Even the dino’s glass-of-water-shaking footsteps aren’t factual – this monster at the top of the food chain walked on its tippy toes.

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