The highest auction estimate of €1.5 million ($1.7 million) was shattered by the sale of the largest Triceratops fossil ever discovered, a 66 million-year-old skeleton known as "Big John," for €6.6 million ($7.7 million).
Big John was offered for sale in October 2021 at the Drouot auction house in Paris, where he was shown with a vast collection of fossils, meteorites, and other items from natural history.
Geologist Walter W. Stein Bill made the first discovery of the skeleton in South Dakota in 2014. It is believed that the dinosaur was a resident of Laramidia, a vast, extinct continent that, at the time, spanned from Alaska to Mexico.
The muddy dinosaur remains were first excavated, and then they were repaired in Italy so that archaeologists could view the dinosaur's actual size. Big John's skeleton is more than 60% complete, and his head measures almost 9 feet long and just over 6 and a half feet wide. Triceratops skulls are among the "most striking" of all land animal skulls, according to the UK's Natural History Museum.
The sale of Big John is not going to delight everyone, though. The Society of Vertebrate Paleontology (SVP) expressed concerns to Christie's in September 2020, prior to the sale of the Tyrannosaurus Rex named "Stan" at Christie's, which sold the following month for a record-breaking $31.8 million.
"Fossil specimens that are sold into private hands are potentially lost to science," they declared. The verification of scientific claims—which is crucial to the advancement of science—cannot be done since, even if made available to scientists, the information contained in privately owned specimens and future access cannot be guaranteed.
