If you have £500,000 ($808,000) to spare, you can own a 55ft long and 19ft tall rare fossil of a dinosaur. Seriously. The 150-million year old skeleton set of a Diplodocus longus will be put on the auction block in Britain on November 27. Misty, as the remains have been nicknamed, will be the set of fossils of a large dinosaur bone that will be put on sale.
The skeleton of the Diplodocus longus, traced to have roamed the planet during the Late Jurassic era, was unearthed in 2009 in Wyoming by the children of Raimund Albersdoerfer, a paleontologist exploring Dana Quarry at the time. The area is a known source of dinosaur fossils. The young Albersdoerfers went to an area of no interest but to their father's surprise, the two kids went back with a big find. The excavation of Misty, named after the mysterious quarry site, took the team roughly nine weeks.
The Summers Place Auctions in West Sussex will manage the sale led by Errol Fuller, an expert in natural history. The auction is dubbed as "Evolution."
"There are probably about six of these in the great museums of the world, including in Pittsburgh and Washington.'You are talking about a very rare item indeed. Even if you were lucky enough to find one in the first place, the digging out and the preparation then involved is an enormous undertaking," explained Fuller when interviewed by Metro.
'The rock that it was embedded in would have been extremely hard to break away from the bones, and you couldn't go at it with a sledge-hammer because the bones were vulnerable to breaking," he added.
The curator foresee the Diplodocus longus fossils ending up in a museum located in Asia or being bought by a private collector. The curator also added that the skeleton of the dinosaur was allowed to be transported outside the United States because it was found in a private property.
The set of bones will require at least a day to be disassembled and assembled again by a team of three people. The bones of the large dinosaur were designed so they can be bolted together and secured to an armature made of metal.
Aside from Misty, there will be also be a fossilized Ichthyosaurus on sale. The specimen was discovered in Lyme Regis. The item is of the same species that was first discovered in 1811 by famous paleontologist Mary Anning.
There will also be Dodo bones crossing the auction block, along with modern and antique taxidermy works, minerals, and other fossils.
