The largest triceratops skeleton ever found, known as “Big John,” will be sold Thursday at auction house Hotel Drouot in Paris. It measures 26 feet long and is 60% complete. Photo courtesy of Hotel Drouot
Oct. 21 (UPI) — “Big John,” the world’s largest Triceratops fossil ever found, sold for $7.7 million Thursday at the Hotel Drouot auction house in Paris, setting a new European record.
The 66-million-year-old skeleton was first discovered in South Dakota by geologist Walter W. Stein Bill in 2014.
The name of the buyer, believed to be a U.S. collector, was not revealed.
The skeleton, which is about 60% complete, measures 26 feet long and had been expected to sell for between $1.4 million and $1.8 million, according to the Hotel Drouot.
Big John’s skull alone, which is 75% complete, measures 6.6 feet wide, and his two largest horns each are nearly 4 feet long and 1 foot wide at the base.
The auction house says that a laceration on Big John’s collarbone is evidence of a fight with a smaller triceratops.
“These violent combats took place during the lifetime of these animals, probably for reasons of territorial defense or courtship of a mate,” Hotel Drouot said in a statement.
The triceratopses, which means “three-horned face,” were herbivorous chasmosaurine ceratopsid dinosaurs that emerged during the late Maastrichtian stage of the Late Cretaceous period, close to 70 million years ago in what’s now North America.
A triceratops skeleton is seen at Christie’s in Paris. A different skeleton going up for auction on Thursday is about 60% complete, measures 26 feet long and is expected to sell for as much as nearly $2 million. File Photo by Eco Clement/UPI
“Big John lived in Laramidia, an island continent stretching from present-day Alaska to Mexico. He died in an ancient flood plain — the current Hell Creek geological formation [in South Dakota] — allowing the conservation of his skeleton in mud, a sediment devoid of any biological activity.”
In 2020, the bones were reassembled at the Zoic workshop in Italy under the supervision of paleontologist Iacopo Briano, who said the skeleton was 5% to 10% larger than that of any other triceratops previously discovered.
“It’s a masterpiece,” Briano said, according to The Guardian. “There are quite a few triceratops skulls around the world, but very few of them [are] almost complete.”
A year ago, a 67 million-year-old Tyrannosaurus rex skeleton sold at auction for a record-breaking $31.8 million to become the most expensive fossil of all time.
Auctioneer Alexandre Giquello said Big John’s immense skeleton would likely only pique the interest of about a dozen collectors throughout the world.
“There are … people who are passionate about science and paleontology,” Giquello said, according to The Guardian. “They are often quite young, coming from new technologies; they are in fact the Jurassic Park generation: they have seen the movies and have been immersed in this Hollywood mythology.”
“[Big John] is both a miracle of nature and a work of art,” Hotel Drouot added.