Largest ever dinosaur skeleton at auction expected to fetch up to €5m

The largest dinosaur skeleton to ever be offered at auction is expected to fetch between €3-5m at the Paris auction houses Collin Du Bocage and Barbarossa on November 16.

Formerly thought to be a Brontosaurus, the Apatosaurus is around 150 million years old and measures a whopping 69ft (21m). Nicknamed ‘Vulcain’, its bone structure is more than 80% complete, which is unusually comprehensive.

Vulcain will be on public display at the Domaine de Dampierre-en-Yvelines from July 13 until 3 November.

The expert for this particular skeleton is Eric Mickeler, who in the past 20 years has been responsible for a range of previous dinosaur skeleton sales at Christie’s, Sotheby’s and Aguttes.

To unite and reconstruct the remains of this giant herbivore required three years of excavation. The GPS point and excavation plan will be given to the purchaser alongside an osteological map (with authentic bones coloured).

In 1997, Sotheby's New York became one of the first auction houses to focus on this expanding area, famously selling ‘Sue’, a complete Tyrannosaurus Rex with all her teeth and vertebrae, for $8.4m. That skeleton was 13ft (4m) high and 42ft (13m long).

Today, Sue resides in the collections of the Field Museum in Chicago. This record price stood unequalled until 2022, when The Raptor snapped up that crown. The skeleton of a Deinonychus antirrhopus was the inspiration for Steven Spielberg’s Jurassic Park and was bought by an Asian client at Christie’s in New York for $12.4m.

Last year, Trinity, a skeleton assembled from the bones of three different T-Rexes found between 2008-13 in Montana and Wyoming, sold for nearly €5.6m at auction. Swiss auction house Koller sold Trinity to the Phoebus Foundation, the foundation of businessman Fernand Huts.