Advertisement

SKIP ADVERTISEMENT

Dinosaur Skeleton to Be Returned to Mongolia

After a little detour through the American criminal justice system, Mongolia’s celebrity dinosaur, Tyrannosaurus bataar, is heading home, the most recent stage in a journey spanning some 70 million years.

At a ceremony on Monday near the United Nations, American officials are scheduled to turn over to Mongolian representatives the unusually complete skeleton of the giant raptor, 8 feet high and 24 feet long. It was seized last year from a confessed looter and commercial paleontologist, Eric Prokopi of Gainesville, Fla., who had smuggled in the bones and sold the reassembled creature at auction for just over $1 million. The sale was later canceled.

“In this business I hesitate to identify any particular return as the most unusual,” said John T. Morton, director of United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement, who is to preside over the repatriation with United States Attorney Preet Bharara. 

After all, Mr. Morton recalled in an interview, there have been saber-toothed tiger fossils and Hitler’s bookmark and Saddam Hussein’s AK-47. “But this is clearly one of the most exceptional, if not the most exceptional, we’ve ever returned.”

Mr. Prokopi, whose age was given as 38, is free on bail recently reduced to $100,000 from $250,000 and is awaiting sentencing, now rescheduled for Aug. 30. He faces up to 17 years in prison and hundreds of thousands of dollars in fines. As part of his guilty plea on Dec. 27, he agreed to forfeit the Tyrannosaurus skeleton; a second, slightly smaller, T. bataar (from a Mongolian word for “hero”); and two Saurolophus and two Oviraptor skeletons, among others he acknowledged illegally importing. 

Mr. Prokopi’s lawyer, Georges Lederman, said he had advised his client not to make any public statements before his sentencing, but he also said Mr. Prokopi was cooperating with the government “for a favorable outcome.”

Image
This Tyrannosaurus bataar, brought to the United States in pieces by a Florida smuggler, is returning to Mongolia.Credit...U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement

Mr. Morton said agents were pursuing other aspects of the smuggling. “The investigation continues,” he said, declining to elaborate.

The case came to light last year when paleontologists including Mark A. Norell of the American Museum of Natural History noticed the skeleton being advertised for sale by Heritage Auctions in Manhattan. They alerted the Mongolians, who contacted the State Department. “But they didn’t have any success,” he said, “and the State Department ultimately contacted us.”

The federal investigation revealed, according to the complaint, that from April 2010 to August 2012 Mr. Prokopi and unnamed others conspired “to smuggle and clandestinely introduce” the bones through fraudulently labeled shipments and sell them.

Prosecutors also alleged that Mr. Prokopi traveled to Mongolia to excavate dinosaur bones, but that was not among the charges to which he pleaded guilty. Bataar fossils from the late Cretaceous period about 70 million years ago were first discovered in the Gobi Desert in 1946. Mongolia, a former Soviet satellite state and now an independent country, has had laws going back to at least 1924 declaring fossils, resources from the soil and cultural artifacts to be national property.

“Think about it,” Mr. Morton said. “Here’s something that’s been in the ground for 70 million years. This was the last of the great living dinosaurs right before extinction, roaming the plains of what is now Mongolia at the very end of the period of the dinosaurs. And here you have looters and black marketeers exercising the level of arrogance that is unbelievable, that they’re going to engage in personal profit on something that has literally witnessed this span of time. It is shocking.”

Mr. Morton said that the formal repatriation — set for 11 a.m. on Monday at the One UN New York Hotel on East 44th Street, between First and Second Avenues, in the presence of officials from the Mongolian president’s office and culture ministry — underscored Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s role in matters beyond immigration.

“We’re working with our foreign counterparts to protect heritage just as we would like them to protect our heritage,” he said.

“There’s an increasing awareness in the public and the art world that there’s a real cost-paying consequence to this kind of theft and black market sales,” he said. “No one benefits when people loot dinosaur bones or engage in grave robbing or defacing temples. We need to take real steps to preserve these treasures around the world so that when you get to Angkor Wat, Angkor Wat is still there.” 

A correction was made on 
May 7, 2013

An article on Monday about the return of a looted dinosaur skeleton to Mongolia referred incompletely to the United States agencies and officials making the return. They are Immigration and Customs Enforcement of the Department of Homeland Security, which had custody, and the Justice Department’s United States attorney for the Southern District of New York. They are not only Justice Department officials. The article also omitted the name of a Mongolian paleontologist who, with Mark A. Norell of the American Museum of Natural History, played a role in halting the auction of the skeleton last year. She is Bolortsetseg Minjin. And because of an editing error, the byline for the article misspelled the writer’s surname. He is Ralph Blumenthal, not Bumenthal.

How we handle corrections

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section C, Page 3 of the New York edition with the headline: Dinosaur Skeleton to Be Returned to Mongolia. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

Advertisement

SKIP ADVERTISEMENT