If you’ve long dreamed of having a Tyrannosaurus rex skeleton on display in your studio apartment, Sotheby’s has some good news, assuming you also have somewhere between $20 million and $30 million lying around. One of the largest and most complete T. rex skeletons ever discovered will go up for auction on July 14.
Its name is Gus.
Gus is 38 feet long and about 12.5 feet tall. He’s roughly 63 percent complete by bone count, making it one of the most complete T. rex specimens ever offered for sale. The fossil is named after the late Gary “Gus” Licking, a South Dakota cattle rancher who spent years finding small fossils on his 6,500-acre property before correctly assuming there had to have been a much larger specimen somewhere beneath his feet.
Sadly, Licking never got to see Gus fully unearthed. He died about a year into a three-year excavation project wherein a team from Theropoda Expeditions spent three consecutive summers digging up the bones, followed by several years of cleaning, identifying, and assembling all 183 fossilized elements that make up the Gus we know today. It was essentially a giant Lego set if a Lego set once ate living creatures.
Gus the Gigantic T. Rex Should Probably Go to a Museum But What Do I Know
As we live in an era increasingly by and for the rich, we can also see this trend in the distribution of dinosaur fossils. As I covered in 2025 and again earlier this year, rare prized skeletons that would have been on display in museums for the public to appreciate or in scientific labs to be studied, are increasingly being snatched up by the rich, who cram them in their own private collections to be viewed only by them and their equally privileged guests, with vanishingly few of them buying these pieces and then donating them to museums.
Only time (and a shitload of money) will tell if Gus ultimately ends up in a museum for all to appreciate or in a billionaire’s opulent man cave between a wine collection and a grand piano entirely made of elephant bone.
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