A Tyrannosaurus rex skeleton nicknamed "Gus" sold for $50.1 million Tuesday at Sotheby’s, becoming the most expensive set of dinosaur bones ever sold at auction, the auction house said.

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The 67-million-year-old fossil blew past its $20 million to $30 million estimate after a 10-minute bidding war involving seven bidders, Sotheby's said.

According to The Associated Press, the winning bidder participated by phone and chose to remain anonymous.

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"This result has been years in the making, and I'm thrilled to see that the hard work and dedication of Thomas Heitkamp and his team has been recognized," Cassandra Hatton, Sotheby's vice chairman and worldwide head of Science & Natural History, said in a statement.

"Gus is not only an exceptional find, but a specimen that's been excavated, documented, prepared, and cared for with real excellence. The market responds when great specimens are taken care of in the right way."

Standing about 12½ feet tall and stretching roughly 38 feet long, Gus is one of the largest and most complete T. rex specimens ever discovered, according to Sotheby's.

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The skeleton includes 183 fossil bone elements, making it about 61% complete by bone count and representing an estimated 75% to 80% of the dinosaur's original bone mass.

The skeleton also offers clues about what Gus endured during its lifetime. Sotheby's said several ribs and belly bones show fractures that healed before the dinosaur died, while bite marks on parts of the skull and other bones may have been caused by scavenging.

The road to Tuesday's record-breaking sale began on a cattle ranch in Harding County, South Dakota.

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According to Sotheby's, ranch owner Gary "Gus" Licking had spent years finding teeth and small bone fragments on his property before partnering with Thomas Heitkamp and his team from Theropoda Expeditions to search for something larger.

Licking pointed the team toward an area of his 6,500-acre ranch where he believed something significant lay beneath the surface, and that is where the fossil was ultimately discovered.

Licking died in 2022, about a year after the excavation began, before the full scope of the discovery was known. The dinosaur was later named in his honor.

However, unearthing Gus was no small task.

Sotheby's said Heitkamp's team spent three field seasons excavating the fossil before years of lab work cleaning, documenting and assembling the skeleton.

"This is our longest-term project ever," Hatton said in a video released by Sotheby's. "From the day the first bone was discovered, we've been going back and forth to South Dakota to oversee this whole process."

Dana Licking, Gary's widow, said she was grateful the fossil was uncovered.

"I'm really grateful that they found it because it could have been lost and nobody ever would learn anything about it," she said in the Sotheby's video. "To make it come to life takes a lot of love and care and dedication, and they stopped at nothing to make that happen."

Heitkamp said uncovering the massive predator required years of persistence.

"This specimen took three years to excavate," he said in the Sotheby's video. "In the end, our diligence paid off, and we were delighted to discover what turned out to be a huge and incredibly complete T. rex specimen."

The record-breaking sale also renewed a long-running debate over whether rare dinosaur fossils belong in private collections or public museums.

The Society of Vertebrate Paleontology said specimens like Gus are best preserved in museums, where they can remain available for scientific research and public education.

According to the AP, the group hopes the fossil's new owner ultimately chooses to make it accessible to the public.

"Our hope is that the new owner recognizes the extraordinary scientific and educational value of Gus the T. rex and that they aim to keep it in the public trust by immediately donating it to an accredited natural history museum," the group's president-elect, Kristi Curry Rogers, said in a statement, according to the AP.

Gus broke the previous auction record set by "Apex," a stegosaurus skeleton that sold for $44.6 million at Sotheby's in 2024 and is now on long-term loan to the American Museum of Natural History in New York. Before that, the T. rex known as "Stan" sold for nearly $32 million in 2020, according to the AP.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

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It’s easy to argue that these three bands have been pretty overplayed throughout the years. Whether their one hit took over the radio, or they’ve just been in the mainstream focus for so long, many of their better songs have flown under the radar.

Here are three underrated tracks from bands that have saturated rock music for years.

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“Slow Motion” by Third Eye Blind

When you think of Third Eye Blind, it’s almost a guarantee that “Semi-Charmed Life” will come to mind first. Unless you’re a day-one superfan, much of Third Eye Blind’s better songs were drowned out by the popularity of “Semi-Charmed Life”. But “Slow Motion” has a similar disarming way about it. Where “Semi-Charmed Life” was about hard drugs dressed up in a fun-loving beat, “Slow Motion” is a satire of media exploitation in the guise of a piano ballad.

Specifically, “Slow Motion” commented on Hollywood and mainstream media’s glorification of violence and drug use. At the same time, it served to highlight the exaggeration of working and lower-class neighborhoods in the media. By depicting over-the-top scenarios, “Slow Motion” delivered a one-two punch to both the glamorization of violence and fearmongering propaganda.

“Panic Song” by Green Day

“Panic Song” is an underrated and visceral track off of Green Day’s album Insomniac. Now, as much as it pains me to say it, Green Day is overplayed. They truly peaked with American Idiot, and their subsequent releases haven’t really held up to that standard. But even before that, their hit singles were so popular that a lot of the deep album tracks got lost.

On Insomniac, “Panic Song” often gets buried beneath “Brain Stew” and “Jaded”, or “Geek Stink Breath”. And the album already wasn’t one of their bigger successes. But it does contain the strangely raw “Panic Song”, which depicts what it feels like to have a panic attack with pinpoint accuracy.

“Red Mosquito” by Pearl Jam

Another band that has been around the block for a while and has become overplayed as a result. Pearl Jam is a pillar of the 90s grunge scene, but, like Green Day, many of their more interesting songs get buried by the radio-ready hits. It does a disservice to Eddie Vedder’s more expressive songwriting.

“Red Mosquito” is one of those underrated songs, appearing on the 1996 album No Code. It already has a wild guitar sound, which lends itself to the claustrophobic lyrics. Written while Vedder was stuck in a hotel room recovering from severe food poisoning, “Red Mosquito” depicts what it’s like to be a trapped animal, feeling watched and paranoid.

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