A rare 17-metre-long skeleton of a diplodocus dinosaur - one of the largest animals to have ever walked the Earth - is expected to fetch up to a whopping 600,000 pounds at an auction in UK.
Relatively complete skeletons of Diplodocus Longus, an iconic plant-eating dinosaur, are extremely rare and this specimen joins only a handful of other known examples.
The female Diplodocus skeleton is nicknamed 'Misty' and is expected to fetch between 400,000 to 600,000 pounds when it goes under the hammer at Summers Place Auctions in West Sussex on November 27.
Misty was found by the children of the fossil hunter Raimund Albersdoerfer near to the privately owned Dana quarry in Wyoming and painstakingly prepped at a leading fossil laboratory in Holland before being assembled in the UK.
The auction entitled 'Evolution' will also showcase a 150-million-year-old fossil Ichthyosaurus (Ichthyosaurus communis) from the Jurassic coast around Lyme Regis. It is expected to sell for 50,000 to 80,000 pounds.
The sale also contains a wide variety of rare taxidermy specimens including a Tarpan (a now extinct variety of a horse), estimated at 5,000-6,000 pounds, a giant Aldabran tortoise (3,000-3,500 pounds) and a large Victorian display diorama of mainly African tropical birds (2,500-3,000 pounds).
