It is an exceptional specimen measuring 21 meters long. While awaiting its auction on November 16, the dinosaur is on display at the Château de Dampierre, in Yvelines. It could cost its future owner between 3 and 5 million euros.
He is an unexpected guest at the Château de Dampierre, straight out of the Jurassic period. A dinosaur without flesh, but made of bones. Vulcain is his nickname. “ We are welcomed into this room as soon as we walk through the door by this apatosaurus skull », Comments Pascal Thévard, general manager of the Dampierre-en-Yvelines estate. “ So unlike other dinosaurs, the Apatosaurus skull is not very colossal. And so we then have 4/5 meters of neck length and the rib cage which is supported by these four large legs. All the bones we see are original fossils, with one bone weighing 250 kg. I can’t explain how to put it at that height in this room…”
Obviously, next to this behemoth, we feel very small. Olivier Colin du Bocage, auctioneer at Paris Enchères takes the measure. “ I reach almost the top of the tibia, that gives you a proportion of this animal which is extraordinary. » Extraordinary, that’s the word. Twenty-one meters long, almost 5 meters high for this dinosaur which looks down at us from the height of its 150 million years. “ It is the largest dinosaur ever put up for auction. It is then the one which is the best preserved of all that we know. We are between 80 and 85% of bones – and in particular the skull – which are there. », explains the auctioneer.
The dinosaur could be a new species
Vulcan was discovered in 2018 in Wyoming in the United States. It was after three years of excavations that the fossil of 300 bones was shipped to France, to a workshop in the Luberon for two years. Two years during which the expertise revealed a singularity. “ It is a dinosaur which has a real personality with this incident on the tail where you have a huge conglomeration of three vertebrae which have been welded together and which prove an attack with this enormous vegetarian which is attacked by a ferocious beast with very large teeth. If you want to project yourself into paleontology, you have a physical trace of an event that happened 145 million years ago », adds Olivier Colin.
A particularity which requires future owners to give paleontologists access to the dinosaur to study it. Especially since his race has not yet been completely determined. “ Perhaps this apatosaur is a new species because it does not have all the characteristics of apatosaurs, and there are not many of them, there are four main classes, and as such the future owner , it is tradition, will be able to give in agreement with paleontologists his name or the name he wants to this apatosaurus. »
Every year, two dinosaurs are sold at auction. Over the last ten years, that’s around fifty dinosaurs sold. A market that is unlikely to fail.
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