(New York) Sotheby’s announced Tuesday that two reconstructed dinosaur skeletons, a flying reptile and a species associated with the legendary Loch Ness monster, will go up for sale at auction in New York.
Named “Nessie”, after the famous Scottish lake monster, the rare specimen of the marine reptile plesiosaur is valued at between US$600,000 and US$800,000 (800,000 to over C$1 million. Sold for C$665,000 in 2010. In Paris , already at Sotheby’s.
At the time, it came from the former collection of a private German museum, the auction house’s catalog says.
Discovered at Blockley’s quarry in Gloucestershire in 1990, the skeleton is “about 75% complete,” an “extraordinary” standard, according to Cassandra Hutton, head of science and popular culture at Sotheby’s. It dates back to the Lower Jurassic period, about 190 million years ago.
With its elongated neck, plesiosaurs were associated in contemporary culture with the Loch Ness Monster, the legendary creature of Scottish folklore, though this theory has been debunked by scholars.
It will be auctioned July 26 in New York, during a private “Natural History” sale, says Sotheby’s, as will a skeleton of a pteranodon, a flying reptile with a wingspan of 6 meters, and is estimated at between $4 and $6 million. (5.3 to 7.95 million Canadian dollars).
Discovered in Kansas, US, Horus was found with its wings spread “and almost all of the original fossil bones have not been recovered,” says the auction company.
However, it notes that the skull was reconstructed using a “3D restoration” technique and that “bones not found at the excavation site were replaced with high-resolution 3D-printed elements”.
Fossils of prehistoric animals are now the stars of a regular auction.
The record value belongs to a Tyrannosaurus Rex, which sold in 2020 for $31.8 million (CAD 42.1 million).
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