The skeleton of a diplodocus dinosaur that roamed what is now the United States 160 million years ago was sold for £400,000 (Dh2.4 million) to an unidentified public institution at an auction in Britain on Wednesday.
Misty, as the dinosaur was nicknamed, will later be put on public display, the auctioneers said.
It was found by the teenage sons of the German dinosaur hunter, Raimund Albersdoerfer, in Dana quarry in Wyoming, in the western US.
The auctioneers, Summers Place Auction, declined to disclose any details about the buyer, who wished to remain anonymous.
“Finding a reasonably complete diplodocus of this size is extremely rare,” said Errol Fuller, a natural history expert and curator of the sale. “They are only ever really found by luck.”
The sons of the paleontologist came across Misty’s fossilised bones after their father sent them to hunt another area because they were distracting him from his own search.
“The children wanted to find their own bits and pieces, so he sent them where he thought they might find a few fragments but nothing really important, and they came back saying that they had found this enormous bone,” Fuller said.
Since the discovery was made on private rather than Federal land, it was possible for Mr Albersdoerfer to remove the fossils from the US.
They were sent to the Netherlands, where they were cleaned and assembled, and then to the UK, where Misty was sold.
The remains of the 17-metre female are among the few more or less complete skeletons of diplodocus longus ever found. It is one of the longest creatures ever to have inhabited the Earth.