“Shen itself has been fully digitalized,” he told CNN at a press conference. When Shen went on display in Singapore last month, Christie’s president for Asia Pacific, Francis Belin, rejected the suggestion that auctioning the skeleton minimized the opportunity for further scientific study. “While certainly there is no law in the US that supports this for fossils that come off private land, it’s easy for me as a scientist to argue that that fossil is important to all of us, and really ought to be going into a public repository where it can be studied - where the public at large can learn from it and enjoy it.” David Polly, a professor and chair of the department of earth and atmospheric sciences at Indiana University Bloomington, told CNN earlier this year, when Sotheby’s sold the skeleton of a Gorgosaurus, a relative of the T. “In my own opinion, there are only cons,” P. Paleontologists have also argued that potential commercial gains discourage landowners from giving professional researchers access to fossil sites. Since the first dinosaur auction 25 years ago, sales of large fossils have courted controversy, with experts worried that housing specimens in private collections can make them unavailable for scientific study. rex specimens, we don’t have anything against auctions, but we do want people to be true and fair,” he added. “We don’t have anything against people selling T. Larson said he is in touch with Shen’s current owner in order “to make sure this doesn’t happen again.” “They pulled it from the auction, which … is what they should have done.” “I do not necessarily blame Christie’s for this,” Larson said. “It sits very naturally against a Picasso, a Jeff Koons or an Andy Warhol.Both Santangelo and Larson told CNN the changes didn’t go far enough toward addressing their concerns but added that Christie’s had done the right thing by withdrawing the skeleton from auction. rex is a brand name in a way that no other dinosaur is,” says Hyslop in the statement, adding that for the right buyer, the skeleton might compliment their high-art treasures. Hyslop calls the opportunity “a once in a generation chance.” It remains to be seen who, whether an individual or an institution, will take the bait in October and bid on Stan. Riley Black reported for National Geographicin 2013 that paleontologists have excavated about 50 T. rex skeleton “Sue” to the Chicago Field Museum for a record $8.3 million. The last time an auction house carried out a sale of these prehistoric proportions was in 1997, when Sotheby’s sold T. He adds: “e looked even larger and more ferocious than I’d imagined.” “I’ll never forget the moment I came face to face with for the first time,” says James Hyslop, the head of the scientific instruments and natural history department for Christie’s, in a press release. rexes were likely both predators and scavengers, although scientists have debated the dinosaur’s eating habits for years, as Riley Black reported for Smithsonian magazine in 2011. As an adult, he could run at speeds up to 25 miles per hour, and his baseball-sized eyes allowed him to spot things up to nearly four miles (six kilometers) away, per Christie’s.Īccording to the Institute, researchers studying his skeleton found that Stan suffered a broken neck during his lifetime, after which two vertebrae fused together. Starting out the size of a small turkey, he grew to weigh about seven to eight tons, or twice the weight of an African elephant. Stan grew up in the humid, semi-tropical region of Laramidia-the part of the continent that’s now North and South Dakota. rex skeletons of all time, per a Christie’s blog post. There, scientists have used his bones to write countless academic studies, making it one of the most-researched T. rex skeletons in the world, Stan has been preserved in the Black Hills Institute in South Dakota for the last two decades. The ancient dinosaur is nicknamed Stan, after the amateur paleontologist Stan Sacrison who first uncovered its bones in the Hell Creek Formation in South Dakota in 1987.įive years after the initial discovery, scientists spent 30,000 hours carefully extracting each of Stan’s 188 fossilized bones, reports Jack Guy for CNN. As Zachary Small reports for the New York Times, until October 21, pedestrians and dinosaur enthusiasts can catch a glimpse of the “ prize fighter of antiquity” behind floor-to-ceiling glass windows in Christie’s 49th Street offices in New York City. The 67-million-year-old fossil is estimated to sell for a cool $6 million to $8 million, reports Eileen Kinsella for artnet News. But despite the big-name artists, another item up for grabs might crush the competition: a 13-foot-tall, 40-foot-long, toothy skeleton of a Tyrannosaurus rex. Christie’s will auction off paintings by Jackson Pollock and Pablo Picasso in its evening sale on October 6.
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