Topics: Dinosaurs, Science, World News, France
The largest ever dinosaur skeleton to go up for auction has fetched millions of dollars.
Nicknamed Vulcan, the remains went under the hammer in Paris, France earlier this month.
The skeleton, thought to be around 150 million years old, weighs a hefty 22 tons and stretches the length of two school busses.
An anonymous buyer snapped it up for a huge $6.4m (around €6.15m).
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I can't say my Animal Crossing fossil collection has made anywhere near that amount of money.
The new owner has since promised to keep it on public display and will continue to allow scientists to study it.
Impressively, the near-complete skeleton is in pretty decent shape.
It's made up of exactly 300 bones, of which up to 80 percent are believed to be authentic.
You can see its breath-taking, true scale in the video below.
The remains are that of an Apatosaurus, a plant-eating dinosaur that lived in North America during the Late Jurassic period, between 102 million and 145 million years ago.
The fossil was discovered at an unnamed site in Wyoming sometime between 2018 and 2021, according to French news agency AFP.
Auction house Barbarossa, which ran the bidding alongside Collin du Bocage, say Vulcan is now 'the biggest dinosaur ever sold at auction worldwide'.
It's not clear, however, which fossil previously held this record.
According to Rare Resource, the Apatosaurs were slow-movers and flocked together on riverbanks in herds.
They would eat a diet of only the leaves they could reach at the very top of trees.
Scientists reckon these dinosaurs 'could not raise their neck to an angle of 90 degrees, as doing so would sluggish blood flow to the brain'.
Meanwhile, studies of the arrangement of their vertebrae suggest their neck wasn't as flexible as previously thought.
Because of this, 'no one knows how Apatosaurs ate enough food to gratify their enormous bodies,' the site states.
It's believed they may have eaten 'constantly,' pausing only to 'cool off, drink or to remove parasites'.
These dinosaurs also had a single claw on each forelimb and three on each hindlimb. Its skull is said to resemble that of the Diplodocus.
It's also believed they may have used their tail as a whip to create loud noises, or, as more recently suggested, to feel things around them.
Their anatomy posed further issues for the dinosaurs.
It meant they must have slept standing upright, swinging their tails from side-to-side and stomping on predators in self-defence.
Let's face it, these poor Apatosaurs sound like they never stood a chance.
At least their legacy as largest dinosaur skeleton ever auctioned will live on...
