A Florida fossils dealer whose
dinosaur was seized by the U.S. government so it could be given to the
government of Mongolia wants it back.

Lawyers for Eric Prokopi, of
Gainesville, Fla., said in court papers filed Monday that he was victim of a
media campaign stirred up by academic paleontologists.

The government seized the
Tyrannosaurus bataar skeleton, known as Ty, in June. It had sued to obtain the
bones, which had been sold at an auction for $1.05 million.

According to the court papers,
Prokopi and Dallas-based auction house Heritage Auctions were in negotiations
with Mongolia”s president to settle the dispute when the U.S. filed a seizure
lawsuit to obtain the dinosaur.

The government had no immediate
comment on Monday. The auction house has said it wants a “fair and just
resolution.”

A judge had ordered the U.S.
government to seize the dinosaur from a storage facility in New York after the
U.S. claimed it had been brought into the country with bogus documents. The
U.S. said the documents disguised the dinosaur skeleton, which originated in
Mongolia, as reptile bones from Great Britain.

Prokopi has said in a statement that
he brought the bones into the country in March 2010 when they were just chunks
of rocks and broken bones. He said he turned them into “an impressive
skeleton.”

According to the court papers, about
25 percent of the dinosaur is made of inorganic, plastic material molded from
other fossil specimens while 50 percent is from one bataar specimen and the
rest is from other specimens.

The court papers called the effort
to return the 70 million-year-old skeleton to Mongolia unprecedented, saying
fossils from China, Kazakhstan, Mongolia and Russia have been openly sold on
the international market and collected in the United States by people and
museums for generations.

Associated Press