Sotheby’s in Manhattan to auction the Apex stegosaurus – Credit: Matthew Sherman

Jason Cooper is a fossil hunter, so when his 45th birthday rolled around and a friend asked him what he wanted, the answer was a simple one—another extra special dinosaur fossil.

The keyword is “another” because with a 100-acre home atop Colorado's Morrison Formation, Cooper has dug up plenty of dino bones before.

The BBC aptly describes the Morrison Formation as being to dinosaurs “what California was to nuggets of gold in the mid-19th century.” But as big as some of those nuggets of gold were, even the biggest couldn't measure up to what Cooper stumbled upon in 2022.

“We looked around. My friend found some vertebrae. I said, ‘Oh my gosh, this is turning out to be a really great birthday!'” Cooper told the BBC. “I saw the spikes of a tail sticking out and a couple of the big plates on its back. I could tell it was still curled up.”

Cooper had discovered a three-fourths complete skeleton of an adult male stegosaurus, standing 11.5ft tall (3.5m) and stretching 27ft from the top of its head to the tip of its spikey tail.

Taking out as much as there was from the sedimentary rock of a cliff face, Cooper and his friends sealed the exposed fossils up in protective jackets and hauled them away in a truck to the birthday boy's workshop.

Once there, the non-academic professional did an exquisite job removing the millions of years of sediment and rock from the mineralized bones. Cooper has donated many fossils of different kinds to scientific institutions, but this one was destined for Sotheby's showrooms on the island of Manhattan, where it's predicted to earn $4 to $6 million when it goes up for auction.

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Some of the most famous fossilized skeletons of dinosaurs, including complete Tyrannosaurs and Montana's famous “dueling dinosaurs” have been auctioned, but Cassandra Hatton, Sotheby's Global Head of Science and Popular Culture, says it is the first time a stegosaurus of this kind has been offered by a major international auction house.

“This is an incredibly important discovery, and I don't know of another stegosaurus that matches the size and quality of this one,” she said, adding that “even impressions of the skin have been preserved.”

Jason Cooper in the middle of excavating the stegosaurus – credit, Jason Cooper, released

Cooper named the skeleton “Apex” because it represented the full size that stegosaurus could grow to be.

Cooper won't be at the auction in July—he'll leave the particulars to an agent and be back out at his ranch looking for the next big find.

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