Environment Life

Triceratops skeleton to be auctioned

Fahad Redha

March 11, 2026
3 min read

A Triceratops skeleton that was once an attraction at a Wyoming museum is set to go to auction later this month. The fossil, known as Trey, stood in the museum for decades but will now be open for bidding from 17^th to 31^st March on Joopiter, an online auction platform founded by music artist Pharrel Williams. It is estimated to fetch between $4.5 million to $5.5 million.

Trey is a 66-million-year-old fossil from the late Cretaceous period. The triceratops skeleton was discovered near Lusk in Wyoming in 1993 by Lee Campbell and the late Allen Graffhan, a commercial palaeontologist who was renowned for multiple significant fossil discoveries in his life. The 5.3-metre (17 ft) long fossil was there for the 1995 grand opening of the Wyoming Dinosaur Center in Thermopolis, remaining on loan until 2023.

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Having recently sold in a private sale, the triceratops skeleton is in Singapore where it is available for a private viewing until the end the month, the auction platform said.

Trey “has this cultural aspect that a lot of fossils that go to auction these days just simply don’t have,” said paleontologist Andre LuJan who worked to prepare it for auction. “This one is connected to people and undoubtedly has inspired young children who’ve seen it to pursue a career in paleontology.”

While fossils have recently become popular investments, some palaeontologists fear that important specimens could end up lost in private collections, preventing researchers from studying them. Public museums are “getting totally priced out of an exploding market,” said Kristi Curry Rogers, a Minnesota’s Macalester College palaeontologist.

“If a fossil goes into a private collection without guaranteed access forever, that data is essentially lost to science,” said Curry Rogers.

LuJan however noted that Trey had always been privately owned, hoping it will eventually end up in a museum.

“Because we’ve had this paradigm shift in what owning dinosaurs means to society, people are naturally gravitating toward these benevolent situations where they loan them long-term to museums or they end up donating them to a new museum that’s just being born,” LuJan said.

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