Rare 150 million-year-old dinosaur skeleton to be auctioned in Paris

By Esra Taskin

PARIS (AA) - The skeleton of a rare 150 million-year-old dinosaur will be put up for bidding in the French capital next month, according to Parisian auction house Hotel Drouot, which will handle the sale.

The fossil is an almost complete copy of a giant plant-eating dinosaur that roamed North America and Europe in the Late Jurassic period.

This rare fossil-dinosaur is called Barry, after Barry James, the paleontologist who discovered and restored its remains in Wyoming in the early 2000s.

In a statement last week, Hotel Drouot said Barry "is an adult specimen of Camptosauridae, a member of the family Iguanodontidae, one of the earliest groups of dinosaurs discovered."

The dinosaur stands 2 meters (6.6 feet) high and 5 meters long and is unique in its almost complete structure. It is expected to be sold for up to €1.2 million ($1.27 million).