A near-complete dodo skeleton has sold at auction in Britain for just under 280,000 pounds ($470,000).

According to Summers Place Auctions, which sold the skeleton at its West Sussex estate, a private collector made the winning bid by telephone for a total of just over $580,000 including the auction house fee.

Auction house spokesman Rupert van der Werff said the skeleton, which is the only privately owned dodo, is one of "less than 20" in the world.

"In terms of completeness, it's certainly in the top handful of skeletons, so it's a pretty fantastic specimen," he told the ABC.

"There are less dodo skeletons than there are T-rex skeletons."

The auction is part of the "evolution sales" series, which has also seen a woolly mammoth go under the hammer.

Experts confident skeleton is anatomically accurate

A private enthusiast compiled the dodo after collecting bones from different birds for decades, which originally came from a swamp in Mauritius.

"The way the bones were found, they were found by people wandering through the swamp with bare feet, and when they trod on something hard they'd reach down and pick it up," Mr van der Werff said.

"In London in the 1860s there was an auction of a lot of dodo bones that were collected because it was really famous and fashionable in the Victorian time.

"The collector who has put it on sale from us has carefully pieced together the skeleton bone by bone from the lots in that auction. And he managed to do it because nobody else thought it was possible."

Despite the dodo being sourced from different birds, Mr van der Werff said he was confident the skeleton was anatomically correct.

"It conforms very similarly to other flightless bird skeletons," he said.

"The fact that it's even got a lot of its claws and the small toe bones and things like that is just extraordinary."

The dodo, which was endemic to the isolated island of Mauritius east of Madagascar, was wiped out in the 17th century through a combination of human predation and the introduction of feral animals to the island.

Auctioneers had expected the skeleton to sell to a museum, with interest coming from China and the Middle East.