A cattle rancher found dinosaur bones on his land for years — then a T. Rex discovered on his ranch sold for $50 million

The 2026 T. Rex goes by Gus – named after Gary “Gus” Licking, the owner of the South Dakota ranch where he was discovered.

Gus had potential buyers outbidding each other for nearly 10 minutes before he found a new home. Sotheby’s declined to give a name or location for the buyer. He had initially been expected to sell for between $20 million and $30 million.

Humble beginnings

The first piece of Gus was discovered in 2021 on Licking’s land. It took three years to excavate the bones and a couple more to extract, clean, identify and assemble them into an exhibition-ready display.

Licking, sadly, never got to see the assembled final product, as he died one year into the excavation. The cattle rancher, however, always had an interest in the history of his land.

He realized there might be something worth investigating after years of finding small teeth and small bone fragments, so he struck a partnership with Thomas Heitkamp, a commercial paleontologist and founder of Theropoda Expeditions, who began hunting for bones on the land.

Gus was discovered on the spot Licking suggested they look. The skeleton is made up of 183 bones, which is approximately 63% of a complete T. Rex, and what Sotheby’s calls an “exceptionally preserved skull.”

Gus lived a hard life, though. An examination of the bones found the T. Rex had suffered several injuries, including fractured and healed ribs, and there were clear bite marks to several skull bones.

“It really does feel like tackling the world’s hardest puzzle, except we have to find all the pieces first,” Heitkamp said in a news release. “All those bones separated for 67 million years that we can now, almost magically, fit back together. There’s something deeply satisfying about that.”

A small club

It was just 124 years ago that T. Rex was first discovered by paleontologists. Barnum Brown (aka “Mr. Bones”) found the first fossil while digging in southeastern Montana. While the dinosaur has taken over pop culture since then, only 32 or so have been found since that first discovery. Many of those were just a single bone.

Only two before Gus have been more than 60% complete: Sue, who now spends her days at the Chicago Field Museum, and Stan, who hangs out at the newly opened Natural History Museum in Abu Dhabi.