Neither Picasso nor Monet set a new record during Christie's ‘20th Century Evening Sale’ on 6 October, but something else did. After twenty minutes of bidding, the almost complete Tyrannosaurus-rex skeleton, also known as STAN, was sold for four times its estimated price of $8 million. The anonymous bidder has to pay $31.8 million, with fees, corresponding to £24.7 million.
In 1987, the Tyrannosaurus rex skeleton was found in the Cretaceous Badlands of the United States. STAN, named after the paleontologist Stan Sacrison who discovered the dinosaur, is one of the world's most complete Tyrannosaurus-rex skeletons. Finding such complete specimens is incredibly rare, and finding them on the auction market is rarer still. The last time a comparable fossil came to auction was in 1997, when a T-rex named Sue sold for $8.36 million (£6.5 mil) to the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago.
See also: Archaeologist Sentenced for Faking His ‘Unbelievable’ Finds
But who was STAN? He lived 65 million years ago during the Late Cretaceous, the prehistoric age when the mass extinction of dinosaurs occurred. He lived in the semi-tropical island continent of Laramidia, an area that today stretches across North Dakota, South Dakota, Wyoming and Montana in the United States. From starting out as small as a turkey, STAN soon grew 4 meters high, 12 meters long and weighed about 6,000-7,000 kilos.
After STAN died and his skeleton rotted, it was gradually covered by sediment, sand and mud. Thanks to fossilisation, we can experience this enormous creature today, even though it lived millions of years ago.
