NEW YORK (AP) – A rare full skeleton of a 150 million-year-old dinosaur languished on an auction block Saturday, failing to sell despite interest from two museums, the auctioneers said.

Neither museum could meet the less than $300,000 minimum price for the 9-foot-long fossil of a dryosaurus, said Josh Chait, operations director of I.M. Chait Gallery/Auctioneers.

The stumbling block “was a lack of funding, more than the price,” he said.

He said the gallery was still trying to broker a deal and had agreed to waive its commission if the fossil sold to a museum. He declined to identify the institutions that were interested.

The dryosaurus was a long-necked, plant-eating reptile that lived in the Jurassic Period.

The skeleton, unearthed at a private quarry in southern Wyoming in 1993, was being sold by Western Paleontological Laboratories Inc. The Lehi, Utah-based company searches for fossils and keeps some for display and scientific research.

The company didn’t immediately respond to telephone and e-mail messages Saturday.

Several other remnants of bygone beasts did sell at the natural history-focused auction, though for less than expected.

A roughly 20,000-year-old fossil of a young woolly mammoth, 7 feet tall and 15 feet long, sold for $55,000, Josh Chait said. The skeleton of a 16-foot-long giant marine lizard called a mosasaur sold for $67,000. It dates from late in the Cretaceous Period, which extended from 144 to 65 million years ago.

The mammoth and mosasaur both had been estimated to fetch as much as $100,000. A 7-foot-long mammoth tusk went for $27,500, below estimates that started at $35,000. All were purchased by unidentified private collectors.

“I can only guess the economy’s having an effect,” Chait said, adding that the items might have fetched up to 10 times as much last year.

Many people are surprised to find that the remains of dinosaurs and other ancient creatures aren’t always housed in museums and can be bought, he said.

“In a perfect world, every one would be donated to a museum, but it’s sort of a double-edged sword,” he said. “If there was no commercial fossil market, some of the stuff … may never have been discovered.”

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On The Net:

I.M. Chait Gallery/Auctioneers: http://www.chait.com/

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AP-ES-03-21-09 1912EDT