‘Stan’ The T-Rex Has Moved To Abu Dhabi After Being Bought For $31.8M

In 2020, a skeleton of a Tyrannosaurus Rex—adorably named ‘Stan’—was sold to an anonymous buyer at Christie’s for a staggering US$31.8 million, essentially making it the most expensive fossil ever sold at auction.

According to ARTnews, the sale vastly exceeded the previous record held by ‘Sue’, a dinosaur fossil that sold for US$8.4 million in 1997 to the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago. 

For the past two years, many have wondered who the mysterious owner of the T-Rex was, and where the 40-foot-long, 13-foot-tall skeleton may be lying. Now, it’s finally been uncovered that the fossil has gone across the globe, and will end up at a new natural history museum in Abu Dhabi. 

Reporters at National Geographic were the first to discover the fossil’s new home, after tracking its sale via US trade records. The magazine stumbled upon a 5.6-ton shipment, with a value of US$31,847,500—the exact price paid for Stan—that had been exported from New York to the United Arab Emirates (UAE) in May 2021. 

According to Artnet News, this speculation was later confirmed by representatives at the Abu Dhabi Department of Culture and Tourism, who told the reporters Stan would be the centerpiece of an upcoming Natural History Museum in the country. 

The Chairman of the Department of Culture and Tourism told National Geographic the dinosaur now had “a new home here in Abu Dhabi,” and the forthcoming museum would be used to “tell the story of our universe through some of the most incredible specimens known to mankind.”

The new 377,000-square-foot museum is slated to open its doors to the public in 2025, and will be situated in the cultural district on Saadiyat Island. In addition to Stan, it has acquired a fragment of the Murchison meteorite, famed for breaking over Australia in 1969, as part of its collection. 

[via Artnet News and ARTnews, images via Christie’s]