LAS VEGAS — The auctioneer gazed out at the audience, knowing this was the moment they'd waited for. Next up, he said, was lot No. 23 -- a "wonderful, exceptional, 66-million-year-old Tyrannosaurus rex skeleton known as Samson."
He gestured to the ferocious-looking skull sitting on a stand to his left. "There she is," he said. The people who had gathered in the elegant gallery at the Venetian hotel gasped.
Samson is one of the three most complete T. rex specimens ever discovered, possessing the most intact skull in existence.
But auctions are unpredictable, and dinosaurs are expensive. So an ugly prospect hung in the air Saturday: Might Samson not sell?
On Friday, Thomas Lindgren, the curator in charge, and auctioneer Patrick Meade had talked about just that between meetings with prospective buyers. People from across the world had expressed interest in Samson, but nobody was committed to bidding.
"If I'd have had this T. rex two years ago, we would have set world records," Lindgren said wistfully. But, he said, the recession had caused everyone -- museums, schools and even eccentric collectors with deep pockets -- to scale back.
To Lindgren, a dinosaur devotee who has spent 30 years of his life excavating, collecting and auctioning fossils, this was not just another sale. His professional reputation, he said, was on the line.
"This is the pinnacle of my career," he said. "I want it to be a home run. I want to be the guy that slid into home plate at the end of a grand slam at the end of the world series of paleontology."
He paused.
"I don't want to be the guy that struck out and lost the game."
Samson was discovered in Harding, S.D., in the late 1980s, when a rancher's son noticed some bones sticking up from the earth. A few years later, a pair of commercial fossil collectors cut a deal with the rancher, excavated the bones and sold them to an anonymous buyer. For more than a decade, Samson's bones remained in storage.
Then earlier this year, the owner contacted Los Angeles-based Bonhams & Butterfields about selling them.
When the auction house sent Lindgren, its co-director of natural history, to inspect the dinosaur, he got chills.
"I looked from bone to bone and realized what an amazing specimen this was," he said. "To actually be in the presence of the most magnificent species that ever walked the planet, it's almost like being in the presence of the holy grail of paleontology."
