Triceratops skeleton to hit auction block

Kids love to collect dinosaurs, and some adults are just grown-up kids with larger wallets. But to collect the dinosaur called “Trey,” you’re gonna need a dino-sized wallet.

Trey is a Triceratops skeleton that had “lived” at the Wyoming Dinosaur Center in Thermopolis until 2023, The Associated Press reported.

But Trey is looking for a new home and is being put up for caution on Joopiter from March 17 to 31.

Trey’s skeleton is about 66 million years old, dating back to the late Cretaceous period. The remains were unearthed near Lusk, Wyoming, in 1993 by Lee Campbell and Allen Graffham.

“Horns forward. Frill flared. A face built like a fortress. Trey doesn’t need an introduction — he’s the dinosaur you recognize in a heartbeat. There are dinosaurs, and then there is Triceratops: the silhouette of prehistory. Trey is a cultural monument in the fossil record — museum-exhibited, extensively documented, and offered with a public life few specimens can claim,” Joopiter said on the auction page.

Once he was ready for display, he took center stage, greeting visitors to the dinosaur center from 1995 and for about 28 years.

The auction website said that more than a million visitors saw Trey on display.

Trey, however, was sold in a private transaction and was moved halfway around the world to Singapore, where it is on display for private viewings through the end of the month until the auction gavel comes down.

It is estimated that Trey will fetch between $4.5 million and $5.5. million.

The Triceratops isn’t the only dino discovery up for sale in recent years.

The Stegosaurus “Apex” was sold for a record-breaking $44.6 million at auction, breaking the record held by Tyrannosaurus rex named Stan, which fetched $31.8 million.

Another dinosaur sold by Sotheby’s, which was expected to get $4 million to $6 million, raised more than $30 million when the auction was over.

“(Dinosaurs) have always captivated our imagination ... and people are now starting to see the value in investing in these as assets,” paleontologist Andre LuJan told the AP. He helped prepare the Triceratops for auction.

But not everyone thinks the priceless artifacts should be sold at auction, adding that once they’re in private hands, scientists may not be able to study them.

Public museums are “getting totally priced out of an exploding market,” Minnesota’s Macalester College palaeontologist Kristi Curry Rogers said.

“If a fossil goes into a private collection without guaranteed access forever, that data is essentially lost to science,” she said.

Trey, according to LuJan has always been in private hands, and Apex was put on display at the American Museum of Natural History in New York after its owner and the museum came to a long-term loan agreement.

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