Christie’s auction house in Paris announced last week that an American collector purchased the rare skeleton of a 65-million-year-old Triceratops. The three-horned vegetarian was unearthed in the badlands of North Dakota in 2004 and has spent its latest years hidden away in a European collector’s private museum.

The unnamed buyer, who paid nearly $1 million, has given no clue about where this huge fossil will now reside. Here’s a suggestion: a public museum, say in Bismarck, N.D., where scientists, students and thousands of ordinary dinosaur lovers would be allowed to see it.

The last public auction of a dinosaur was more than a decade ago, when Sotheby’s put Sue, a massive Tyrannosaurus rex (definitely not a vegetarian), on the block. Sue went for a whopping $8.3 million, but the buyer was not someone who planned to keep her hidden in the family chateau. The Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago purchased Sue with help from a few big corporations, including McDonald’s and Disney.

John Hoganson, the state paleontologist of North Dakota, says that it would be a “tragedy” if this North Dakota skeleton is not available to the public somewhere and that the best of all places would be in its native North Dakota.