Going Once, Twice, a 3-Horned Triceratops

PARIS, April 16 -- Imagine you had dough to blow -- say, about $800,000 -- and a big empty space to fill. And suppose you never kicked that grade school dinosaur passion, which is ready to explode quicker than you can say "Cretaceous."

A roomful of people played out that fantasy Wednesday at Christie's auction house in Paris, where a 65 million-year-old, 25-foot-long dinosaur skeleton was put up for bid.

The bad news is that the creature -- a menacing, three-horned triceratops -- didn't meet the owner's reserve minimum of 500,000 euros, or $800,000, so it didn't sell. But the good news is that afterwards, Christie's announced that the bidding will remain open by telephone for the next two weeks.

"I don't understand what happened," said Christie's spokeswoman Capucine Millot. "Five hundred thousand euros is a gift. It should have sold for at least a million euros."

Other pieces drew spirited jostling from phone, Internet and floor bidders. A 2 million-year-old saber-toothed tiger skull with vicious fangs went for $114,000 -- about $40,000 over its pre-auction estimate.

Despite not hitting its minimum, the triceratops drew the highest bid of the day and was the most spectacular specimen in the "Natural History" auction, which offered about 150 items -- some 450 million years old -- that normally can be found only in museums or elite private collections.

But the star attraction was the triceratops, posed in mid-stride on a steel frame in Christie's lobby, its mouth ajar, looking ready to rampage.

When it roamed the world in the late Cretaceous Period, the four-legged, plant-eating triceratops stood about nine feet tall and weighed about six tons, with a large bony frill for a collar, armor plating on its back and a horny beak.

The bronze-colored skeleton was found by a rancher in North Dakota about four years ago and reportedly was owned by an anonymous German collector who displayed it for friends at his private chateau. Christie's experts said the skeleton is about 70 percent complete, with the missing bones replaced by replicas sculpted in resin.

It was the first major dinosaur skeleton to go on public auction since a Tyrannosaurus rex dubbed Sue, after the woman who found it, was sold for $8 million by Sotheby's in New York in 1997.

The triceratops bidding started at 420,000 euros (about $670,000), but when the hammer came down, the top bid was $784,000, which Christie's officials later said was shy of the $800,000 minimum set by the owner. Officials at the auction house would not say who submitted the top bid.

Gilles Fauchon, 65, said he collected pledges of almost $100,000 from "dinosaur fans" to try to bring the beast home to his town along the French-German border, even though he realized he had no chance of winning. "I'm here for the sport" he said.

"Coming here is like a professional disease for me," said Fauchon, a chiropractor. "I'm obsessed with bones, so having a full triceratops spine would be a dream. . . . It would be the best patient I've ever had."