The auction house announced Saturday that a Tyrannosaurus-Rex skeleton going back 67 million years will be auctioned in Switzerland next month, marking the first such sale in Europe.
The Trinity skeleton will be auctioned off on April 18, 2023, in Zurich by the Koller sale house.
According to the sale catalog, Trinity, which stands 3.9 meters (12.8 feet) tall, is worth between six and eight million Swiss francs ($6.5-8.7 million).
But Christian Link, in charge of natural history memorabilia at Koller, told he thought that was a “very low estimate”.
Trinity, a well-preserved and expertly restored fossil, is “one of the most spectacular T-Rex skeletons in existence,” according to the auction company.
The auction would give a complete T-Rex dinosaur skeleton (67-Million-Year-Old) of exceptional quality for the first time in Europe and only the third time overall.
Koller cited a 2021 research published in the academic journal Nature that claimed only 32 adult T-Rex skeletons, one of the biggest terrestrial predators ever to walk the Earth, had been discovered globally.
Auction sales of dinosaur skeletons and other fossils have raked in tens of millions of dollars in recent years, but experts have warned the trade could be harmful to science by putting the specimens in private hands and out of the reach of researchers.