LiveScience has a story about the sale of Stan the T-rex on October 6th, 2020.  Stan sold for $32 million and set a new record for the sale of a fossil.  SUE the T-rex, which went on sale back in 1997, had the previous record as it sold for $8.36 million.

Many paleontologists are dismayed that Stan sold for so much to an unknown buyer, especially now that many scientific institutions don’t have the money to purchase such fossils and keep them in the public domain. However, unlike other dinosaur specimens, Stan had no choice but to go to the auction block, so how did it end up there?

Normally, the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology (SVP) opposes the auction of such fossils. In 2018, for instance, SVP asked the Aguttes auction house in Paris to pull the plug on auctioning off an Allosaurus, a type of meat-eating dinosaur, that had been found on private land in Wyoming. In contrast, Stan came to the auction house not because its owner wanted to turn a profit, but through a court order, which complicated SVP’s response. 

Amateur paleontologist Stan Sacrison found Stan in 1987 in the Hell Creek Formation, near the town of Buffalo, South Dakota, according to the Black Hill Institute of Geological Research (BHI), a company that supplies fossils for research, teaching and exhibit. After learning about the specimen, BHI scientists spent more than 300,000 hours excavating and preparing the nearly 40-foot-long (12 meters) T. rex, which they named after its discoverer. 

The T. rex became famous, headlining at the T. rex World Exposition, a yearlong tour that opened in Japan in 1995. In 2005, the BBC TV show “The Truth About Killer Dinosaurs” created a replica of Stan’s skull and jaws to learn about T. rex bite force; and researchers reported in 2009 in the journal PLOS One how they had studied Stan to better understand how dinosaurs moved.