PARIS (AFP) — A private US collector has paid close to one million dollars for the rare skeleton of a triceratops, a three-horned vegetarian dinosaur that roamed the Earth 65 million years ago, Christie's auction house said Friday.
The unnamed collector paid 592,250 euros (944,167 dollars) for the near-complete skeleton in a deal announced after the fossil failed to find a buyer at an auction held Wednesday in Paris.
Bidding for the massive 7.5-metre-long (25 feet) three-horned skeleton reached 490,000 euros during the auction, falling short of the reserve price of 500,000 euros set by the owner.
Unearthed from the badlands of North Dakota in 2004, the triceratops belonged to a private "western European" collector who had it on display alongside two other dinosaur fossils in his private museum in a chateau, said Christie's expert Eric Mickeler.
The skeleton is 70 percent complete, a rarity in paleontology, with only the tip of its horns made from resin and a few reconstituted bones in its hind leg and a rib.
The triceratops was the star attraction at the auction of paleontology objects that totalled 2.1 million euros and set 11 record prices, Christie's said.
The auction marked the first time that such a dinosaur specimen has gone up for public sale since a T-Rex called "Sue" was sold in New York in October 1997.
Sue -- named after South Dakota resident Sue Hendrickson who stumbled on the fossil during a walk -- is the most complete tyrannosaurus rex ever recovered and was bought by the Chicago Field Museum of Natural History for 8.3 million dollars.
The auction has been criticized for encouraging private collectors to buy up artefacts of potential value to science.
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