T. rex fossil Gus heads to auction in New York for up to $30 million

A 67-million-year-old Tyrannosaurus rex fossil nicknamed Gus will go on the block in New York with an estimate of $20 million to $30 million and an opening bid of $19 million. Sotheby’s will offer the specimen in its Natural History / Geek Week sale on July 14, and the final price could make it the most expensive fossil ever sold.

Gus was found in 2021 on a cattle ranch in Harding County, South Dakota, in the Hell Creek Formation, and Thomas Heitkamp and his team spent three years excavating it. Sotheby’s says the mounted skeleton measures about 38 feet long and 12 and a half feet tall, with a 54-inch skull and a femur longer than Stan’s. The auction house also says the fossil preserves 183 bone elements and is about 63 percent complete by bone count, representing roughly 75 percent to 80 percent of the animal’s total bone mass.

The specimen has drawn attention not just for its size, but for what it preserves about the animal’s life and death. Sotheby’s says Gus shows healed fractures and bite marks, signs of violent encounters that could have come from combat or scavenging. It also describes the fossil as exhibition-ready, with an unusually complete set of remains that make it one of the most significant T. rex skeletons known.

Cassandra Hatton, Sotheby’s vice chairman and worldwide head of science and natural history, has said Gus is one of the most important Tyrannosaurus rex specimens to come to market and ranks it as the third most complete T. rex known, behind Sue and Stan. That places the sale squarely inside a long-running fight over whether major fossils should end up in private hands or public institutions, and whether the market is pushing scientifically important finds out of reach for museums and researchers.

Sotheby’s own history with dinosaurs shows how high the stakes have become. The auction house held its first dinosaur sale in 1997, when Sue the T. rex sold for $8 million to The Field Museum in Chicago. More recently, Stan sold in 2020 for $31.8 million, and Apex, a Stegosaurus, sold in 2024 for $44.6 million, records that keep raising the price of extraordinary prehistoric remains. If Gus sells near the top of its estimate, the question will not only be who can afford it, but who gets to study it.