DAMPIERRE-EN-YVELINES, France (AFP) — The skeleton of a 22-metre-long dinosaur (70 feet) fetched US$6.4 million Saturday, AFP learned from auction houses Collin du Bocage and Barbarossa.

An anonymous collector snapped up the vegetarian apatosaurus, which was dug up in the United States, for US$6.4 million including costs. It is the largest dinosaur ever to be auctioned in France.

The buyer pledged to allow it to be displayed in a museum.

“We are happy that the buyer intends to lend it to an institution,” said Olivier Collin du Bocage. They skeleton of the giant herbivore is made up of 75 to 80 per cent of the original bones and is roughly 150 million years old.

The giant creature’s skeleton, which weighed around twenty tonnes during its lifetime, spent the summer in the orangerie of Dampierre-en-Yvelines, a chateau some 50 kilometres (30 miles) southwest of Paris, where the sale took place.

The remains of the apatosaurus, nicknamed Vulcan, were discovered in 2018 in Wyoming, in the United States, where the law allows individuals to acquire concessions in the hope of excavating prehistoric bones. Excavations took place between 2019 and 2021, financed by a French investor.

The fossil, which includes 300 bones, was then shipped to France to be restored.

Its presale value at auction had been estimated at between three and five million euros.

Under the contract of sale the future owner undertakes to give paleontologists access to the dinosaur to study it.