Europe's first and biggest dinosaur skeleton will be up for auction in Switzerland

Koller believed that a private person would be the most likely purchaser, but he was confident that the general public would still have access to it in the future. According to Hans Jacob-Siber, a paleontologist at the Aathal Dinosaur Museum in Switzerland, discoveries of T-Rex remains are exceptionally uncommon.

"It's not a cast or a copy; it's the original. And there are very few, very few," Siber told Reuters. "In fact, until about 1970 or 1980, there used to be less than a dozen Tyrannosaurus, most of them were already in United States' museums."

As almost every other fossilized T-Rex is held in a museum, there is always intense interest whenever a skeleton is put up for auction. When Sue and Stan, two other T-Rexes found in North America, were sold in 1997 and 2020, they brought in $8.4 million and $31.8 million, respectively.

It has a marvelous skull

"This is something very fragile and very rare," said scientific advisor and consultant Nils Knötschke, one of the world's leading professional fossil preparators.

"In general, dinosaur skulls are quite rare; they are among the most precious components. The skull bones of dinosaurs are ­often not fused together, and they detach from each other easily. When dinosaurs died in the Jurassic or Cretaceous periods, they often lost their heads during deposition. In fact, most dinosaurs are found without their skulls. But here we have truly original Tyrannosaurus skull bones that all originate from the same. To be honest, I was quite nervous when we mounted the skull here in Switzerland since I was so much in awe of it."