An incredibly rare and near complete Diplodocusdinosaur skeleton, discovered in the United States, is now on display and is about to go up for auction in Britain.
At 55 feet (17 meters) long and more than 14 feet (4 meters) high, it’s one of only a handful of Diplodocus skeletons in the world that is about 50 percent complete, with the rest painstakingly replicated. It took experts nine weeks to dig the bones out of the ground, several months to prepare and several more to assemble the metal frame in Holland.
Errol Fuller is the curator of the auction, which will take place at Summers Place Auctions in Billingshurst. He says skeletons like this rarely come on the market, as they are owned by museums, “such a thing in a reasonably good state very rare and there is an awful lot of work has gone into preparing it, digging it out of the ground and consolidating all the bones and then assembling them into the form you see there. There’s hundreds and hundreds and thousands of hours of work gone into that.”
The fossil skeleton was discovered by a paleontologist in a quarry in Wyoming. Fuller explains that he was joined by his children on a dig and sent them to the quarry in an attempt to distract them, “at the end of the day they came back and they said ‘Dad, we found an enormous bone’ so he immediately said ‘Oh yeah. OK, I’ll come and look but do I have to?’ You know. But when he went and had a look there was one of these enormous leg bones laying exposed, it had taken all day to expose and he realized straight away that there was going to be a lot more there and the rest...is sort of up there.”
The estimated value is between 650,000 (USD) and 968,000 (USD) (400 and 600,000 GBP), but auctioneers admit they don’t really know what price tag to put on such a rare item.
Fuller said he’d like to see the fossil end up in the Natural Museum of History in London, where a famous Diplodocus skeleton replica has stood in the main hall for more than a century.
The auction will take place November 27.
