“Samson,” the Tyrannosaurus rex that failed to sell at a Las Vegas auction last month, has a new owner and may be on public display soon, the auction house announced.

Thomas Lindgren, the co-director of natural history auctions for Bonhams and Butterfields, wouldn’t say who bought the dinosaur or how much was paid, but said the private owner hopes to have the fossils on display in a museum by Christmas.

“They’re negotiating right now with a number of different museums that have interest,” Lindgren said. “We shouldn’t have to worry about her disappearing into a private collection, which certainly was a worry for a while.”

While he wouldn’t identify the price -– whether to reveal that information is left up to the new owner –- Lindgren said the successful offer was “somewhere in the $5 million area.” The bidder paid cash, Lindgren said.

Samson is considered the third most-complete T. rex ever found, with 170 bones, or about 56 percent of the body.

The dinosaur was put up for auction Oct. 3 at the Venetian resort along with almost 50 other items. The T. rex got a final bid of $3.6 million at the auction, short of the minimum price set by the owner.

Like Rodney Dangerfield the Dryosaurus gets no respect.  Not now or millions of years ago.

If there was a playground back in the Late Jurassic period, the Dryosaurus was the kid with two left feet, bad asthma and glasses so thick bullies used them to burn ants. While it was built like a super model with long neck and long slender legs, it didn’t have the sex appeal of the Raptor, Brontosaurus, Triceratops or T-Rex. Old Dryo was basically just food and fodder for others.

Last weekend a 9-foot-long Dryosaurus skeleton that was expected to bring up to $500,000 was a no-sale at the I.M. Chait Gallery in Manhattan. The skeleton was unearthed at a private quarry in Wyoming in 1993. 

An 18,000-year-old woolly mammoth skeleton found in Siberia stole the show for $60,000 while an ammonite fossil went for close to $50,000.
 

The paleontologist who discovered several famous fossils in and around Malta, Monta., pleaded innocent Thursday to federal charges that he stole fossils from Bureau of Land Management property.

Charged with theft of government property, Nate Murphy, 51, faces a maximum sentence of 10 years in prison with another three years of probation and a $250,000 fine.

Murphy was the director of paleontology with the Dinosaur Field Station in Malta for 15 years before resigning July 1, 2007 ... one month after the Montana Division of Criminal Investigations, the FBI and the Bureau of Land Management began their investigation.

In September, state prosecutors charged him in Phillips County District Court with stealing a turkey-sized raptor fossil. Those charges allege that Murphy intended to sell replicas of the fossil, worth between $150,000 and $400,000.

Just last year, one of the nation's foremost fossil restorationists, Joe Taylor, sold a mastadon skull for $191,200 to help his museum avoid bankruptcy.