A Tyrannosaurus rex skeleton called Gus sold for $50.1M (£38.5M) at Sotheby's in New York on 14 July 2026, the highest price ever paid for a dinosaur at auction. Palaeontologists say sums of that size keep an illegal fossil trade alive, because a published price tells anyone standing on a fossil bed what the ground is worth.
Steve Brusatte, a palaeontologist at the University of Edinburgh, called the illegal end of that trade secretive and 'on the level of drugs' in 2022. The damage runs wider than lost research time. Bones that would have gone into a public gallery end up in houses nobody can visit.
