A nearly complete fossil of a stegosaurus has sold for a record $44.6m (£34.2m), becoming the most valuable fossil ever sold at auction.

An anonymous US buyer outbid six others for the set of bones, dubbed Apex, at Sotheby’s in New York on Wednesday.

They paid an apex price, beating the previous auction record of $31.8m (£24.4m) spent on a Tyrannosaurus rex nicknamed Stan in 2020 and smashed the pre-sale estimate of $4m-6m (£3m-£4.6m).

Apex stands 3.3 metres (11 feet) tall and 8.2 metres (27 feet) in length, putting it among the most complete fossils ever found.

The dinosaur had lived long enough to show signs of arthritis, the auction house said.

Cassandra Hatton, who heads Sotheby’s science-related business, said Apex “has now taken its place in history, some 150 million years since it roamed the planet”.

Apex, she said, is like “a colouring book dinosaur“, for its well-preserved features.

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The buyer is American and intends to look into loaning Apex to an institution in the US.

The palaeontology community has mixed feelings about dinosaur fossil sales, as some believe the specimens belong in museums or research centres that cannot afford huge auction prices.

A commercial palaeontologist named Jason Cooper discovered the fossil in 2022 on his property near, perhaps unsurprisingly, the town of Dinosaur, Colorado, a tiny community near Dinosaur National Monument and the Utah border.

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The first dinosaur to be sold at auction was a T. Rex named Sue, who went for $8.2m (£6.3m) in 1997.

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It is the first time an auction house has been involved with a specimen of this kind throughout the whole process, from discovery to sale, Sotheby’s said on its website.

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