Yolanda Schicker-Siber carefully secures a long claw with a thin wire, completing the reconstruction of the skeleton of a Tyrannosaurus Rex, which will be auctioned in Switzerland next month.
A giant puzzle that the curator of the Aathal Dinosaur Museum in Zurich painstakingly put together with other experts in two days. The bones of the T-Rex, which lived 67 million years ago, came to Zurich in nine huge boxes from Arizona, USA.
The approximately 3.9 meter tall and 11.6 meter long skeleton named Trinity lies on a red carpet under crystal chandeliers in the middle of a Zurich concert hall, where it will be displayed before its sale on April 18.
According to auction house Koller, it is estimated at six to eight million Swiss francs (similar amounts in euros). That’s a “rather low” estimate, warned Koller’s natural history expert Christian Link, as we witness a veritable craze for relics of this type by buyers.
Trinity is actually an agglomeration of bones from three different T-Rex found in formations in Montana and Wyoming in the Northwest United States between 2008 and 2013, according to the sales catalogue.
At these locations, two other important T-Rex skeletons had been discovered and then auctioned: in 2000, Stan had sold it for $31.8 million, shredding Sue’s previous record, which had sold for $8.4 million in 1997 .
Last year, the auction house Christie’s had to withdraw another T-Rex skeleton – also from Montana – from sale in Hong Kong a few days ago because of doubts about the authenticity of parts of the fossil.
Very, very old
Restoring Trinity will not be an easy task, Ms. Schicker-Siber assured AFP. “The bones are very, very old. They are 67 million years old. They are therefore fragile, they have cracks,” she explains.
Aart Walen, who has over 30 years of experience assembling dinosaur skeletons, agrees. “We haven’t broken anything yet,” he says proudly as he and his colleagues work on two large ischial bones located near the pelvic region where the eggs come out.
With a parakeet on his shoulder, Mr. Walen fills in the cracks in the bones using what appear to be dental tools and modeling clay. It was important that the repairs were visible, he says, pointing to the dark areas where the cracks were.
“You have to see where the repairs were made. Fake stories are circulating. We don’t want that,” he said.
It also shows that the sound is different depending on whether it hits the bone or the plastic pieces that completed the skeleton.
Room for a T-Rex
A little over half of the skeletal bone material comes from the three tyrannosaur specimens, which is more than the 50% needed by experts to classify such a skeleton as high quality.
The house of Koller wanted to be transparent about the origin of the bones. “Hence the name Trinity. We make no secret of the fact that this specimen came from three different dig sites,” says Link.
The seller is an “individual” who wishes to remain anonymous.
The sale of dinosaur skeletons regularly livens up auction nights, even if it frustrates paleontologists who see it as less of a chance to exhibit them in museums.
However, according to Mr Link, 95% of known T-Rex are currently in museums and any private collector who buys Trinity can loan it to museums if they wish. He personally would also like a Swiss museum to buy it.
Unfortunately, the Swiss Dinosaur Museum in Aathal, which Mrs. Schicker-Siber runs with her father near Zurich, does not have the means to acquire Trinity. “But if someone buys it and doesn’t know where to put it, we have a museum — with enough space — for a T-Rex,” she slips.