IMPORTANT NOTICE: Price above only reflects Deposit/Holding Fee and is non-refundable; Full price is reflected under “Acquire Specimen.” If you have any questions, please consult our fossil expert prior to purchase.

Cost to Acquire specimen:

$19,000,000 - Full Rights to Specimen

$18,000,000 - TPI Retains Casting Rights

($1,000,000 - Non-Refundable Deposit to Hold Item; Applied to final price)

HISTORY
After 25 years of searching, curator Anthony Maltese, of Triebold Paleontology Inc., was on the last hours of the last day of his expedition to the fossil fields when he found what he has been searching for ever since he started fossil hunting: a T. rex. On just this trip alone he had walked over 100 miles crisscrossing a ranch he and his field crews have been scouting and collecting on for well over a decade, yet until now the T. rex had gone undiscovered. The spot had been scouted several times over the years, but only this year were a few bones beginning to emerge due to erosion, allowing them to be recognized.

The bones were scattered under soft mud making it relatively easy to dig up and clean, but tedious to track down all the pieces.

A few hours of excavating that first day yielded about a dozen bones. By the end of a series of summer expeditions to the site, Maltese and the Triebold team had recovered 55 bones from different parts of the animal’s body — tail, hips, shoulders, ribs and skull.

FAST FACTS

• Cannibalized by another rex. There are bite marks all over the tibia and fibula, which are the “chicken leg” of the dinosaur

• Juvenile characteristics on an adult dinosaur: Unfused neural-central sutures and completely unfused scapula/coracoid sutures. This animal was as big as an adult Tyrannosaurus but still had a sub-adult maturity level. It was the 6 foot tall kid in sixth grade who had a beard- not a grown up but sure looked like one.

• Excellent bone surface quality. It’s got the classic “Hell Creek chocolate brown” surface.