Dinosaur Skeleton Sells for Record €1 million at French Auction
Days after they discovered a tail that belonged to a dinosaur caught in amber, another record was broke at a French Auction where a 7-metre-long dinosaur skeleton sold for €1 million.
Kan, the 7-metre-long Allosaurus skeleton was sold at a French auction for over €1 million.
The huge dinosaur skeleton measures seven meters long and two meters high. It belongs to an Allosaurus that lived in the late Jurassic period, a skeleton that dates back to circa 153 million years ago.
The buyer purchased the skeleton at the Aguttes auction house in Lyon and his intentions are to display the skeleton on public location, but we don’t know exactly where yet.
The skeleton that dates back around 153 million years ago is one of the most common dinosaur fossils, many of which have come from the Morrison Formation in Wyoming and Colorado.
Its name, Kan means ‘different lizard’ in Greek because its hollow vertebrae were considered distinct from other dinosaur species known at the time of first discovery in 1877.
The Allosaurus species was a massive carnivore, bigger than the rival T-Rex, with the largest ever found measured 43ft (13 meters) long and 16ft (5 meters) tall.
The skeleton of Kan was displayed at Lyon Brotteaux Aguttes auction house before it was sold for €1.1 million.
Distinguishing features included a disproportionately large head, small horns above the eyes and facial ridges. It had dozens of sharp, serrated teeth and arms with long claws, longer than the ones T-Rex had.
The dinosaur skeleton was discovered in the Jurassic Era Morrison Formation, an era known for its dinosaur fossils, in 2013.
Kan was a large predator with a characteristically large skull and a particularly sharp set of teeth, and its fossil evidence shows it clashed with Stegosaurus.
Its skeleton is nearly entirely intact, and its skull is among the five best-preserved skulls in the world.
Claude Agutte, the auctioneer who sold the dinosaur, told 20 Minutes: ‘This will probably be my last hammer blow.
‘This is the most curious and most unusual object I had to sell. In a career, it’s a great moment.’ The unnamed buyer, who made the purchase by telephone, ‘wants to keep the location a surprise’, a spokesman for Agutte auction house said.
The auction house described the beast as ‘the archetype of the great predators of the Jurassic Era.’
The sale didn’t break any records though, because of the 1.3 million euros fetched by a dinosaur skeleton in October 2010 at Sotheby’s in Paris.
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