Auction house Christie’s on Monday announced the cancellation of the controversial sale of a tyrannosaurus rex skeleton in Hong Kong after the owner decided to lease it to a museum instead.
The 1,400-kilogram skeleton, nicknamed “Shen”, was to be auctioned from Friday, according to Christie’s, which did not provide an estimate of the price or the identity of the seller. “The consignee has now decided to lease the specimen to a museum for public display,” the company said in a statement to AFP.
Paleontologists had criticized this sale, and doubts had also emerged as to the degree of authenticity of the fossil.
Shen, 4.6m tall and 12m long, is an adult male who lived around 67 million years ago. It had been discovered in 2020 in the US state of Montana.
According to the “New York Times”, the sales documents did not clearly state that Shen was partially reconstructed using replica bones from another dinosaur. However, still according to the “New York Times”, resemblances have been noticed between the skull of Shen and that of Stan, another tyrannosaur auctioned in 2020 by Christie’s for 31.8 million dollars. And the holder of the intellectual property rights to Stan, the Black Hills Institute of Geological Research, has revealed that Shen’s owner bought replicas of his dinosaur skeleton from him.
According to experts, it is extremely rare for a dinosaur skeleton to be found whole. A tyrannosaur has about 380 bones in total but, according to Christie’s, only 80 of Shen’s bones are original.
Shen’s proposed sale had been called “bad news for science” by Steve Brusatte, a paleontologist at the University of Edinburgh, even though Christie’s had assured that the entire skeleton had been recorded in three dimensions and made available to the public. provision of scientific research.
“It’s sad that dinosaurs are becoming collectible toys for the oligarchic class,” lamented Mr. Brusatte to AFP.
Thomas Carr, American paleontologist, for his part described these sales as “unquestionably harmful to science”. “A permanent and secure collection ensures that the observations a scientist makes on a fossil can be tested and reproduced – whereas a commercially held fossil does not have this guarantee,” he explained.