Sotheby's, the world's largest and oldest auction house for art and luxury items, has sold the skeleton of a tyrannosaurus rex for $50.1 million. The transaction took place this Tuesday after a bidding war between seven buyers that lasted nearly ten minutes, and the piece has become the most expensive fossil in history. Until now, the fossil that held this title was that of a stegosaurus, which was auctioned for $44.6 million two years ago.

Coinciding with the summer, the latest film in the series initially based on the famous book has just been released in theaters. Jurassic Park by Michael Crichton. This science fiction adventure novel, published in the 1990s, posed the possibility of the de-extinction of the dinosaurs using DNA from these extinct animals extracted from the blood sucked by mosquitoes that had been trapped in the resin turned into amber. Crichton was inspired by the advances in genetic engineering in the 1980s and the potential applications of PCR (polymerase chain reaction, which allows any DNA fragment to be amplified and which we have heard so much about during Covid-19). Shortly after, Steven Spielberg, with his gift for directing films that tell stories that manage to capture everyone's imagination, made a highly successful film, with a recognizable and iconic logo.

Very agile, but of medium size and with small horns that served to match or intimidate opponents. This was the Khankhuuluu –the prince of dragons, in Mongolian–, a new species of dinosaur considered the most recent ancestor of the giant tyrannosaurs and which paleontologists from the Faculty of Science at the University of Calgary have just discovered. In a publication in the journal NatureResearchers have described how this lineage of predators evolved after the extinction of other large predatory dinosaurs around 85 million years ago, providing further insight into the evolution of tyrannosaurs.