Is your apartment living room missing just a little something? Does it need a centrepiece to end all centrepieces?
Have you considered displaying a massive, almost complete TRICERATOPS skull there? Because the world’s largest, most complete dinosaur skull – that of a fossilized male triceraptops – is for sale in Hong Kong!
The skull has a name, as it should: Lung Wong, meaning the “Dragon King”.
Lung Wong is currently in the possession of “private owners”, and the company that’s representing them, aptly named “Evolved”, is taking offers from USD1.8 million (HKD14 million) and up.
We don’t know about you, but if we had that much money lying around, this would be the first purchase we would be making.
After all, the company says that in feng shui, the dragon “epitomizes potency, auspicious opportunity, individual achievement and personal excellence”, and we all know that we are automatically imbued with the powers of what we buy.
The sellers call it “a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity”, claiming nothing similar has been on the market since a T-Rex fossil was sold for USD8.5 million (HKD66 million) in 1997.
“There is nothing like Lung Wong owned by anyone else in the world, including museums, institutions, corporations, or private individuals,” says Evolved.
The website for Lung Wong (yes, it has its own website) has a section so pandering to rich megalomaniacs that we can do nothing but reproduce it in its entirety:
Naming the dragon
By opening a new chapter in the provenance of The Dragon King, the owner becomes forever connected with one of the most important historical and artistic revelations of our generation.
Should the new owner choose to rename Lung Wong, that name will be inextricably associated with the power and majesty of this incredible natural art masterpiece.
Furthermore, palaeontologists who have inspected Lung Wong have said that his immense size suggests he could be an example of a previously undescribed species, possibly the legendary Triceratops maximus. If this is confirmed, the owner will be entitled to name the species for posterity.
So, a rich Hongkonger with an inferiority complex is probably going to buy it and stick a terrible name on it (“Deborah”? “BB”? “Angel 888”?), just like how they ruin their Ferraris and Lamborghinis.
