‘Gus Rex’ Revives Reign of Dinosaur King

The auction at Sotheby’s on Tuesday of a 67 million year-old Tyrannosaurus rex named “Gus” is expected to smash the record for dinosaur skeletons, as the remains of reptilians are increasingly fetching riches. Gus was an apex predator, a killing machine who lorded over the top of the food chain during the Late Cretaceous Period, just before a meteor slammed into the Earth with the force of ten billion atomic bombs and blew the dinosaurs into legend.Sotheby’s reckons that before the asteroid landed, Gus’s “strength, sharp senses, and adaptability” helped it “become one of the most powerful predators the world has ever seen.” It stalked the rich coastal floodplains and open woodlands of western North America, feasting on the flesh of large herbivores like Triceratops and Edmontosaurus. T. rex had the most powerful bite of any known terrestrial animal, enabling it to crush bones like tooth picks.Gus follows in illustrious footsteps. In 1997 “Lucy” became the first dinosaur to be sold at auction. Still the largest, most complete, and best-preserved T. rex discovered, she was unearthed in South Dakota and sold for $8 million and now anchors the collection of the Field Museum. In 2024, Sotheby’s auctioned “Apex” for $45 million to the financier Ken Griffin. The stupendous stegosaurus is now at the American Museum of Natural History.Last year saw the sale of a juvenile Ceratosaurus, another fierce predator, for $30.5 million. Ceratosaurus was smaller than T.rex and possessed a horn. Only four of them have ever been found — compared to 32 of Gus’s species — and the one nabbed by an anonymous buyer last year is the only juvenile on record. Gus was discovered by dinosaur hunter Thomas Heitkamp on land owned by Gary “Gus” Licking, who bequeathed the beast his name.‘Gus,’ a Tyrannosaurus rex fossil from the late Cretaceous Period. Matthew Sherman for Sotheby’sMr. Heitkamp’s team spent three years excavating Gus at South Dakota’s Badlands, and three more years in the lab piecing together the puzzle of the predator. Some 180 bones have been recovered, 82 percent of the total. Sotheby’s brags of the specimen’s “completely represented pelvis” and “well represented axial skeleton including cervical, dorsal, sacral, and caudal vertebrae.” Gus’s body stretched some 38 feet. He was 12 and a half feet tall. Gus’s life was not peaceful. He features “fractured and healed bones” as well as “a number of clear bite marks to several skull bones.” Nine years before the naturalist Charles Darwin would publish “On the Origin of Species,” the poet Alfred Lord Tennyson warned of “Nature, red in tooth and claw” to describe the savagery that challenged the creed that love was “Creation’s final law.” Gus’s place at the summit of his ecosystem would hardly have been serene.Sotheby’s global head of natural history, Cassandra Hatton, reckons that Gus suffered “a huge bite mark on the top of the skull, which could have been sustained during a battle” — though it is unlikely to have been a clash with a Velociraptor like that immortalized in Steven Spielberg’s “Jurassic Park.” T. rex ruled North America while the turkey-sized raptor plied its trade in what is now Asia.‘Gus,’ a Tyrannosaurus rex fossil from the late Cretaceous Period. Matthew Shepard for Sotheby’sBidding on Gus is set to start at a minimum of $19 million, a price too dear for nearly any museum. A researcher at London’s Natural History Museum, Susannah Maidment, tells the BBC that “We’re already priced out of having access to many, many specimens. There’s no substitute for having the real fossil. If we’re going to do any sort of study, the number one thing is we need to understand the anatomy. We need to know what’s real.”

‘Gus Rex’ Revives Reign of Dinosaur King

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