A nearly complete assembled Tyrannosaurus rex skeleton dubbed “Trinity” has sold for $6.1 million at an auction in Zurich, Switzerland.
At 12.8 feet tall and 38.1 feet long, the Tyrannosaurus skeleton is made up of 293 bones from three different dinosaurs, hence its name.
Koller auction house, where Trinity was sold on Tuesday, noted that this was the primary time such a skeleton had gone to auction in Europe, with the bones going to an anonymous private collector.
Although the customer paid $5.3 million for the skeleton, the extra premium and costs pushed the overall sale price to over $6 million, which is the range the auction house was aiming for.
“It is a fair price for a dino,” said Karl Green, the auction house’s marketing director. “I hope it gets shown publicly somewhere.”
Green noted that since Trinity was a composite, the “purists” probably didn’t bid on the skeleton.
![Director of the Koller auction house, Cyril Koller (C), points to the](https://nypost.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/04/NYPICHPDPICT000009806432.jpg?w=1024)
The skeleton was certainly one of the highlights of the auction, which consisted of some 70 items, and in the course of the auction, Trinity’s skull was placed next to the auctioneer’s podium.
Koller said the skull was of particular interest to buyers since it was exceptionally well-preserved.
Nils Knoetschke, a science advisor quoted within the auction catalog, wrote that the majority dinosaurs are frequently found without skulls.
![Koller auction house director Cyril Koller gestures with an auction gavel next to the](https://nypost.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/04/NYPICHPDPICT000009804516.jpg?w=1024)
![Bidders sit next to the painting](https://nypost.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/04/NYPICHPDPICT000009804677.jpg?w=1024)
Trinity was formed from three different fossil sites within the US and was put up for sale by an anonymous American.
At the least half of the skeleton got here from a single Tyrannosaurus.
Koller noted that the 2 sites where the Trinity bones were discovered were also used to create other T-rex skeletons that had been auctioned off earlier.
![Whole Tyrannosaurus skeleton.](https://nypost.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/04/NYPICHPDPICT000009824177.jpg?w=1024)
In 2020, the Latest York auction house Christie’s sold one other nearly complete T. rex named “Stan” for $32 million, setting a recent dinosaur sales record.
The T-rex, whose name means tyrant of the lizard king, roamed the Earth between 65 and 67 million years ago, in the course of the Cretaceous period that ended with the extinction of the dinosaurs.
Scientists imagine that about 20,000 adult tyrannosaurs lived in North America before they were exterminated.