Now's Your Chance to Buy a Large Dinosaur

If ever you needed a reminder that money actually can buy pretty much anything, a giant dinosaur skeleton is going up for auction in England next month.

The 55-feet-long, 19-feet-tall Diplodocus skeleton was unearthed in Wyoming in 2009. Palaeontologist Raimund Albersdoerfer was digging near the Dana quarry and sent his sons away “to get them off [his] back” and they came back saying they found a huge bone. They had discovered a fully intact female Diplodocus skeleton.

The 150-million-year-old skeleton was nicknamed “Misty,” and after she was dug out, she was sent to the Netherlands for prepping, before being assembled in the UK.

On November 27, Misty is expected to fetch between $630,000 and $950,000 as part of an auction at Summers Place Auctions in Billingshurst, West Sussex called “Evolution.” There, the discerning and extinction-minded shopper will also be able to bid on “Dodo bones and a highly important Dodo pelvis, minerals, fossils and taxidermy, both antique and modern,” plus a 150-million-year-old Ichthyosaurus fossil, and a taxidermied extinct Tarpan. There will also be art and shit like that.

It seems weird that, with dinosaur skeletons being so scarce and so valuable for paleontology, rich people can just buy them. Even the Natural History Museum in London is using a cast of a diplodocus skeleton that’s in Pittsburgh.

But this is the new gilded age, and if I’m honest, if I were a billionaire, trillionnaire, or even just out of debt, I’d make sure that at least one of my houses had a dinosaur room. Even if Misty goes into a private collection, away from us plebes, at least now we know how big our imaginary Jurassic Hall in our imaginary mansions would need to be.