A preserved Camptosaurus dinosaur skeleton will be up for auction at a Paris auction house in October of 2023. The 150-million-year-old dinosaur, dubbed “Barry,” was found in Wyoming in the 1990s.
Barry, named after the paleontologist who restored it in 2000, Barry James, is 6.9 feet tall and 16.4 feet long and expected to go for an estimated $1.28 million. The auction itself, slated for Oct. 20, 2023, is rare as dinosaur auctions only occur once every couple of years, according to the auction house Htel Drouot.
In 2023, a T-Rex composite skeleton, Trinity, made up of nearly 300 bones dug up in three different sites in the U.S., was sold to a private collector for $5.3 million.
While rare, dinosaur auctions are not extinct, but some scientists believe they should be. The Society of Vertebrate Paleontology argued that fossil specimens sold to private collectors are lost to science and has pleaded with auction houses to cancel the sale of certain dinosaur fossils.
Auctioneers maintain that the money brought in from these sales typically brings life-changing sums of money for the people who own the land where these fossils have been found.