Sotheby's auction: Mars rock fetches $5.3M, young dinosaur skeleton sells for over $30M
New York: Sotheby’s auction this week featured two incredible relics, one from the vast reaches of space and the other from the distant past of Earth, that captivated bidders and set new records.
A Martian meteorite, NWA 16788, weighing 54 pounds and ejected from Mars by an ancient asteroid impact, sold for an astounding $5.3 million. It was reportedly discovered in Niger’s Sahara Desert in 2023 by a meteorite hunter, after having been blown off the surface of Mars by a huge asteroid strike and traveling 140 million miles to Earth.
The bidding for this rare piece of Mars was fierce, with a 15-minute back-and-forth between online and phone bidders before it was secured by an anonymous buyer.
However, the real drama unfolded over a juvenile ceratosaurus nasicornis skeleton, one of just four known specimens of the species and the only known young specimen. Initially valued at $4-6 million, the bidding for this dinosaur skeleton took off dramatically. The bids surged in rapid succession, with offers increasing by $500,000 and later by $1 million each time, reflecting the skeleton's rarity and significance.
After a heated back-and-forth, the bidding ended at $26 million, but the final sale price, including fees, reached a jaw-dropping $30.5 million, setting a new record for the sale of a dinosaur skeleton. Parts of the skeleton were reportedly found in 1996 near Laramie, Wyoming, at Bone Cabin Quarry, a gold mine for dinosaur bones.
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MP: 7-year-old girl raped and murdered; minor relative detained
Barwani (MP), Jan 28 (PTI) Police on Wednesday detained a 17-year-old relative of a seven-year-old girl in Barwani district of Madhya Pradesh for allegedly raping her and killing her by throwing her into a canal, a police official said.
Superintendent of Police Jagdish Dawar told reporters that the body of the child was recovered from the Indira Sagar Canal on January 26, following information from residents of a village in the Rajpur police station area of the district.
He said the post-mortem report concluded severe injuries to the girl’s private parts and attributed her death to drowning.
Dawar said a 17-year-old boy, a close relative of the girl, has been detained in connection with the rape-murder.
The teenager told the police that he kidnapped the girl from her home on the night of January 25 while her family members were asleep, took her to a nearby canal and raped her, according to the official.
When the girl started screaming during the sexual assault, the minor boy allegedly threw her into the canal, with the intention of killing her. The child drowned in the water body, the official said.
The detained minor will be produced in a juvenile court.
A case has been registered under the Protection of Children from Sexual Offences Act and the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita, and an investigation is underway, he added.
