The first stegosaurus skeleton to go under the hammer is set to fetch millions of dollars in New York.
It was Jason Cooper's 45th birthday and when his friend asked him what he wanted, he declared the best gift would be a new dinosaur and so they set out. And as they walked up the side of a mountain, Mr Cooper spotted a femur bone sticking out of the rock wall. "We looked around. My friend found some vertebrae. I said, ‘Oh my gosh, this is turning out to be a really great birthday!'"
Cooper and his family live in Colorado on top of a geological feature known as the Morrison Formation, a stretch of sedimentary rock dating back to the Jurassic period which covers 600,000 square miles of the western United States. The family owns 100 acres of land and it's not unusual for Jason to find bits of dinosaur skeleton - in fact, to date, he's found ten.
But finding a stegosaurus on his birthday was his greatest strike to date. He's called the prehistoric beast 'Apex'. It's almost 11.5ft tall (3.5m) and fully 27ft from the top of its head to the tip of its scaly tail. And, luckily for Cooper, as he found it on his property he's entitled to do with it as he pleases and that includes making a handsome living out of it.
After the fossil hunters had recorded as much data as they could about where Apex was found, its bones were taped up in protective “jackets” and transferred to the workshop. “Apex is 70 percent complete which is incredible for a dinosaur, especially a stegosaurus,” Cooper told the BBC. And that's remarkably complete according to Cassandra Hatton of Sotheby’s: “Nobody ever found 100 percent of a dinosaur. "A stegosaurus as good as this is hard to find, she says. "I think it’s going to be incredibly important.”
Apex has been disassembled and carefully transported to the dealing rooms of Sotheby’s in Manhattan, where he has now been put back together and will go on show to the public and prospective buyers in July.
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