Tyrannosaurus rex becomes the most expensive dinosaur ever sold as Euclid finds the oldest quasars
Two separate records have extended the boundaries of discovery: in New York, a remarkably complete Tyrannosaurus rex fossil fetched the highest price ever paid for a dinosaur; in space, the Euclid telescope identified quasars whose light began its journey when the universe was only about 670 million years old.
Gus sets a new fossil-auction record
The 67 million-year-old T. rex, nicknamed Gus, sold for £37.4m ($50.1m) at a Tuesday auction in New York. The winning bidder has not been identified.
Gus stands more than 12ft (4m) tall and has more than 60% of its bones recovered. Sotheby’s described it as one of the most complete T. rex specimens ever found. The result surpassed the previous auction record, set by a stegosaurus in 2024, and was the first dinosaur sale to pass the $50m mark.
The fossil was discovered in 2021 on a remote ranch in South Dakota. Its excavation took place over three summers, from 2021 to 2023, when the ground was warm enough to thaw. Reconstructing the animal took a further three years of laboratory work.
That preparation revealed evidence of a violent life. The skull bears bite marks, while several ribs had been broken and healed during the dinosaur’s lifetime. The injuries could have been sustained while scavenging or during a fight with other dinosaurs.
Cassandra Hatton, Sotheby’s worldwide head of science and natural history, said the result had been years in the making. She described Gus as an exceptional find that had been “excavated, documented, prepared, and cared for with real excellence.” Hatton also said the price reflected the time and resources required to uncover and prepare the specimen.
Where Gus goes next
The sale may signal a new phase in fossil collecting, with some scientists warning that increasingly valuable specimens could become trophies for ultra-wealthy private buyers. The immediate question is whether Gus will remain accessible to researchers or the public.
A previous record-holder offers one possible outcome. Apex, the stegosaurus that held the record before Gus, was loaned to the American Museum of Natural History for four years by its billionaire owner, Kenneth Griffin. A similar arrangement could eventually bring Gus to a museum, although no such loan has been announced and the buyer remains undisclosed.
That distinction matters because ownership and access are not the same thing. A museum loan can allow visitors to see a fossil and scientists to study it without transferring ownership. For Gus, the location selected by the buyer—and whether the specimen is made available for long-term research—will determine how much scientific value remains publicly accessible after the auction.
Euclid detects quasars from the universe’s infancy
The Euclid space telescope has found 31 quasars, including the two oldest yet observed. Quasars are extraordinarily bright objects powered by supermassive black holes at the centres of early galaxies. As the black holes pull in surrounding matter, the resulting activity can shine trillions of times brighter than the Sun.
The two oldest quasars are seen as they were when the universe was roughly 670 million years old—about 5% of its current age of 13.8 billion years. That pushes the record for the most distant known quasar back by around 20 million years compared with the previous record announced by the same team in 2021.
The observations were made with Euclid, which is positioned at a stable point around 1.5 million kilometres from Earth, or about a million miles away on the far side of the Moon’s orbit. The findings were reported in a study published on Monday and updated on July 6, 2026, at 6:45 a.m. EDT.
Because light takes time to travel, looking farther into space also means looking farther into the past. Ancient quasars therefore act as bright markers from a period that is otherwise difficult to observe. Their light can help astronomers examine the gas between Earth and the objects, revealing how the universe changed during the epoch of reionization.
That epoch began as the first stars and galaxies formed and ended the universe’s cosmic dark ages. Quasars can function as “lighthouses,” allowing researchers to trace how reionization unfolded across cosmic history.
A growing puzzle about black-hole growth
The discoveries also sharpen a longstanding problem. More powerful telescopes have repeatedly shown that galaxies and other cosmic structures were larger and more developed in the early universe than scientists had thought possible.
Joseph Hennawi, a co-author of the study, said that every step farther back in time makes the puzzle more perplexing. The newly observed quasars contain black holes weighing billions of times the mass of the Sun, even though they existed when the universe was still in its infancy. Scientists do not yet understand how such enormous black holes grew so quickly.
Daming Yang, the study’s lead author, is a PhD student at Leiden University in the Netherlands. He said Euclid had transformed the search, which had previously relied mostly on ground-based telescopes. In only two years, the observatory has doubled the number of ancient quasars known to science.
Euclid’s advantage is the scale of its survey. Rather than finding only the brightest ancient quasars, it can search broad areas of sky efficiently and detect much fainter light. Yang called the telescope a “true game-changer” and a “unique tool for quasar hunting.”
What comes next for the quasar hunt
The team is now searching for even older quasars. The James Webb Space Telescope has also observed the newly announced objects, and researchers will soon begin examining those data. Webb’s detailed follow-up observations could help determine the quasars’ properties and constrain theories about how their black holes formed and accumulated mass.
The longer-term goal is to assemble what Hennawi called a “quasar chronicle of the first billion years” of cosmic history. Such a record could show how rapidly black holes grew, how early galaxies evolved and when the surrounding gas was transformed during reionization.
Euclid was launched from Cape Canaveral on July 1, 2023, aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9. The $1.5bn observatory is intended to chart one-third of the sky while investigating the nature of dark matter and dark energy. Its six-year mission will image the entire sky around the Milky Way and monitor galaxies and galaxy clusters dating back 10 billion years.
The quasar discoveries build on a growing collection of large-scale Euclid observations. In 2024, the telescope captured an image of the galaxy cluster Abell 2390, 2.7 billion light-years from Earth, containing more than 50,000 galaxies. A 2023 image of the Perseus galaxy cluster showed at least 1,000 gravitationally bound galaxies, along with roughly 100,000 more scattered across the distant background, many of them never seen before.
Just last month, scientists announced that Euclid had produced the largest and most detailed image yet of the crowded heart of the Milky Way, an image containing 60 million stars. Together, these observations show why the telescope’s wide field is important: the same survey strategy that finds rare ancient quasars can also reveal vast populations of galaxies and stars across different eras of cosmic history.