Big John, the skeleton of the largest specimen of triceratops ever discovered, is auctioned for $ 7.6 million

The skeleton of largest specimen of triceratops discovered so far, which lived about 66 million years ago in what is now the northern United States, was awarded this Thursday at the Drouot auction house in Paris for 6.651 million euros ($ 7.6 million).

The buyer is “an American collector” who does not want his name to be made public, they explained to EFE sources of the sale, which emphasized that the triceratops will return to the country from which it left (United States).

“An unforgettable event, a great moment of suspense, and a dinosaur acquired by a local customer!”, Commented the Drouot house on their social networks, adding that the bidding for Big John can be seen on the YouTube channel.

The master Alexandre Giquello, the organizer of the auction, and his team they had set a starting estimate at between 1.2 and 1.5 million euros. But their hope was that the ultimate price would well exceed that range.

This specimen of one of the last species of dinosaurs before its extinction, in the Cretaceous, was put up for sale in a new edition of what Drouot calls Naturalia, an auction that for five years has been dedicated to natural curiosities that offer spectacularity and aesthetics at the same time.

This triceratops, christened Big John, was discovered in 2014 by Walter Stein, a specialized researcher, in a deposit in an area known as Hell Creek, in the state of Dakota del sur.

The excavation campaigns lasted the following year and allowed 60% of the skeleton to be reconstituted in painstaking work that was carried out later and over six months in Italy, explained paleontology expert Iacopo Briano.

The assembly of the different fragments with resin and their consolidation in the laboratory by means of a metallic structure with the missing bones allowed to stand the skeleton eight meters long and just under three meters high.

Briano acknowledged that it is difficult to accurately estimate the actual weight of the animal, but in any case they were “Several tons, like a great pachyderm”.

What has been determined is that its size was “between 5% and 10% larger” than the largest specimen of triceratops known so far.

A triceratops with fighting wounds

Investigators found two wounds that were made on you fight with other dinosaurs, probably for the defense of the territory or for their sexual reproduction: one in the tail and, above all, another in the head that caused a gap of about 30 centimeters in a bone.

A paleopathology team that carried out a macroscopic and microscopic study concluded that that piercing was made by the skull of another triceratops. Neither wound was fatal and there are signs that the bone was healing.

In fact, given the large size of Big John, it is considered that the animal must be quite mature and, according to Briano, “He could have simply died of old age”.

Giquello stressed that they never put specimens that have a particular interest for research up for public sale so as not to create competition with museums. In this case, he recalled that the triceratops is such a well-known dinosaur that this specimen offered limited appeal to scientists. (I)