DINOSAUR FAN? SPARE €700,000 lying around? You might still have time to get on the phone and buy yourself the ultimate house ornament.
An almost completely in tact 17 metre Diplodocus skeleton is being sold at auction the UK today.
Pic: Screenshot/ Summers Place Auctions
Diplodocus longus is one of the most iconic of dinosaurs and one of the largest animals ever to have walked on earth some 150 million years ago.
Relatively complete diplodocus skeletons are extremely rare and as a result ‘Misty’, as the female skeleton has been nicknamed, has been given a reserve of £400,000 with an estimate of up to £600,000.
To give some idea of how rare such a specimen is, the famous Diplodocus “Dippy” in the Natural History Museum in London, is a plaster copy taken from an original in the Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
Misty was found by the children of the celebrated dinosaur hunter Raimund Albersdoerfer near to the famous, privately owned Dana quarry in Wyoming and painstakingly prepared at a leading fossil laboratory in Holland before being assembled piece-by-piece in the UK.
The auction of the dinosaur is being held by Summers Place Auctions in West Sussex as part of their ‘Evolution’ sale which also contains Dodo bones, a Dodo pelvis, minerals, fossils and and array of taxidermy.
Included in the taxidermy specimens are a now extinct variety of a horse, the Tarpan, a giant Aldabran tortoise and a large Victorian display diorama of mainly African tropical birds.
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