Curators, collectors and dinosaur enthusiasts have their eye on a rare skeleton of a triceratops up for auction in Paris on Wednesday.

   Curators, collectors and dinosaur enthusiasts have their eye on a rare skeleton of a triceratops up for auction in Paris on Wednesday, only the second fossil of this size ever to go under the hammer.
   Christie's auction house is asking 500,000 euros (792,000 dollars) for the
massive three-horned dinosaur specimen that roamed the Earth some 65 million years ago, but it is expected to fetch a higher price.
   Unearthed from the badlands of North Dakota in 2004, the mud-brown skeleton has been drawing crowds at Christie's showroom in Paris for the past month and enquiries from prospective buyers in Britain, France and the Gulf states.
   Among the bidders for the Triceratops Horridus will be the Dinosaur Museum
in Dorchester, England whose directors traveled to Paris to see the
four-legged 7.5-metre fossil, with its large bony frill.
   "It would be a great addition to our museum," said curator Tim Batty. "It's
a lovely specimen. There really isn't anything like it in Europe."
   Batty said an anonymous wealthy sponsor had come forward to help the museum with its bid to have the triceratops join its current collection which
includes a skeleton of a megalosaurus.
   The auction on Wednesday marks the first time that such a dinosaur specimen goes up for public sale since a T-Rex called "Sue" was sold in New York in October 1997.
   Sue -- named after local resident Sue Hendrickson who stumbled on the
fossil during a walk -- is the most complete tyrannosaurus rex ever recovered
and was bought by the Chicago Field Museum of Natural History for 8.3 million
dollars.
   The triceratops skeleton is 70 percent complete, a rarity in paleontology,
with only the tip of its horns made from resin and a few other bones -- part
of a hind leg and a rib -- reconstituted, said Eric Mickeler, Christie's
expert on natural history.
   The dinosaur is one of three owned by a "western European" collector, who
had them on display in his own private museum set up in huge reception hall of
a chateau, said Mickeler.
   "Such collectors are really not that rare," said Mickeler. "There is a revival of interest worldwide in these pieces."
   Aside from wealthy dino-philes, curators from museums in the Gulf states
were among those considering bids for the triceratops, a vegetarian that
disappeared in the late Cretaceous period.
   The triceratops is the star lot of the auction that will feature some 150
other pieces: fossils, meteors and minerals, some dating back 450 million
years.
   A sabre-toothed tiger cranium has an asking price of 45,000 euros, while a
fossilized giant shark's tooth has been valued at 4,000 euros.
   A private German museum is offering a well-conserved cranium of an
edmontosaurus, a duck-beaked dinosaur, estimated at between 70,000 and 80,000
euros.
   The auction follows a first sale of natural history objects at Christie's
last year that has been criticized for putting on the private market artefacts
of potential value to science.
   "This is part of our worldwide heritage," said Christian de Muizon, from
the National Museum of Natural History in Paris.
   "You never know what research into a triceratops skeleton could turn up. If
it's in the hands of a private collector, its fate becomes uncertain."
   Also up for bids will be a tyrannosaurus egg, mineralized in agate, valued
at between 20,000 and 25,000 euros; and an apatosaurus dinosaur tibia from the Jurassic Period, which is expected to raise up to 30,000 euros.
   Last year's paleontology auction brought in more than one million euros and
established 12 world records.

AFP