![]() ![]() It is the most valuable of its kind to ever be offered at auction and the best preserved to ever come to market, according to Sotheby's. The specimen for sale was discovered in the 1990s in Gloucestershire, England, and measures nearly 11 feet in length. Plesiosaurs were extremely fast predatory reptiles, and may have hunted fish, squid and other small prey. While the body of the plesiosaur was rigid, it could swim rapidly using its big, powerful flippers. They evolved a unique body design not seen in other marine creatures, with a relatively small head and jaws packed with numerous long pointed teeth on a snake-like neck. The plesiosaur, a long-extinct marine reptile, lived in the lower Jurassic Period, about 200 million years ago, and is thought to have inspired the legend of the Loch Ness Monster, a mythical creature in Scottish folklore that was believed to live in a lake in the Scottish Highlands. Those fragments were replaced with high-resolution 3D printed elements, primarily mirrored from the specimen itself, according to Sotheby's. The exception is the pteranodon's skull, which utilized 3D restoration for accurate and aesthetic display of skull sections that were not found at the dig site. This makes the fossil "ideal" for scientific study and transparency of authenticity, according to Sotheby's. It was discovered in 2002 in what was once the Western Interior Seaway, an inland sea that divided the continent of North America into two landmasses, known as Laramidia and Appalachia, according to Sotheby's.Īlmost all of the original fossil bones remain on the pteranodon's remains and are essentially unrestored, meaning that artificial filler was not used to replace missing bone sections. ![]() ![]() The specimen for sale has a displayed wingspan of approximately 20 feet and is believed to be a fully mature adult. The pteranodon is currently displayed in Sotheby’s galleries with wings outstretched in a soaring position and is mounted on a custom armature rigged for ceiling suspension. In the air, pteranodons were superior over the feathered dinosaurs and birds during the Mesozoic Era, before going extinct at the end of the Cretaceous Period. ![]()
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