Millions of years after it walked the Earth, the skeleton of a giant tyrannosaurus has been unveiled in Switzerland, before it is put up for auction.
The giant dinosaur, dubbed the "TRX-293 Trinity", is expected to fetch between 5 and 8 million Swiss francs when it goes on sale in Zurich on April 18.
The tyrannosaurus rex is 3,9 meters high and 11,6 meters long, and is only the third T-Rex skeleton to be offered at auction, and the first in Europe, reports N1.
"The name of that skeleton is 'Trinity' because it is made up of three individuals and they were all found in the US," said Cyril Kohler, owner of the auction house running the auction.
The remaining part of the name comes from the 293 bones in his skeleton.
Kohler thinks the buyer is likely to be a private individual.
Discoveries of tyrannosaur fossils are extremely rare, said Hans Jakob Sieber, a paleontologist at the dinosaur museum in Attal, Switzerland.
"It's not a cast or a copy, it's an original. And they're very, very rare," Sieber told Reuters.
"Actually, by about 1970 or 1980 there were less than a dozen, most of them in American museums," he added.
Almost all other fossilized T-rexes are kept in museums, which means there is huge interest whenever a skeleton comes up for sale.
Two other T-rexes discovered in North America, named Su and Sten, sold for $8,4 million and $31,8 million in 1997 and 2020, respectively.
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