One Of The World's Most Complete T. Rex Skeletons Sells for $27.6M

MIAMI (CBSMiami) – The sale of what's believed to be one of the world's most complete T. rex skeletons was expected to come in around $8 million, but a bidding war at Christie's Auction House smashed that estimate, selling for a whopping $27.5 million.

Christie's Auction House offered a once in a lifetime opportunity of owning your own T. rex. Paleontologists discovered the dinosaur named "Stan" in South Dakota in 1987.

It stands at 13 feet tall, 40 feet long, and has an 11-inch tooth. The skeleton is made up of 188 bones.

"The really interesting pathology about him is that two of the vertebrae in his neck had fused," says Christie's Head of Science and Natural History James Hyslop. "So in life, Stan broke his neck, he survived, it healed, and he carried on being the biggest and baddest T. rex."

At 67 million years old, the dinosaur wasn't going to be cheap.

After taking bids from London and New York, it came down to a battle between two buyers. The dinosaur sold for $27.5 million.

After the fees were added, the final price was at $31.8 million, but that doesn't include shipping and assembly.

The buyer remained anonymous. The previous world record for any dinosaur was also a T. rex named Sue, which sold to the Chicago Field Museum in 1997 for $8.4 million.