Diplodocus auction: For £600,000 you can take one home

Nov. 19 (UPI) -- The Summers Place Auctions in West Sussex, England is auctioning a nearly complete Diplodocus dinosaur skeleton for between £400,000 and £600,000.

The rare item, known as Misty, is only one of six relatively complete diplodocus skeletons in the world. A complete skeleton is rare because most of the time parts are lost to scavengers or washed away by rain and rivers.

The skeleton has had a long journey from being unearthed in Wyoming, assembled in the Netherlands and finally being placed for auction November 27 in England.

The skeleton is made up of 100 genuine fossils and other replica bones and is about 13 feet at the shoulder, reaching 26 feet if it reared its head. The heaviest bone was the pelvis, which took seven men to lift.

The skeleton was discovered by renowned German palaeontologist Raimund Albersdoerfer at a private site in Wyoming. Found by his sons, it took them nearly nine weeks to painstakingly dig the dinosaur out of the ground.

The diplodocus is one of the longest animals to have lived on the Earth, spanning nearly 30 meters and weighing 15 tons. They roamed the Earth nearly 150 million years ago, during the late Jurassic period.

"To my knowledge it's the first time a large dinosaur skeleton has been auctioned in this country," said Errol Fuller, the auction's curator.

Fuller said that a reason for auctioning the dinosaur in Europe was that Albersdoerfe was German and wanted to sell it in Europe. The reason Albersdoerfe could bring it to Europe was because the skeleton was found on private grounds and not a federal site.

"I'm sure the Americans are upset at losing it, but they already have two or three of them in collections," said Fuller. The skeleton is most likely to be sold to a museum, as most museums at present only have replicas.