A judge challenged the government to
beef up arguments it used to seize a dinosaur skeleton for its eventual
shipment to Mongolia, saying Friday there was a “serious question”
about whether the government had sufficiently alleged that the 70
million-year-old relic came from Mongolia or was removed in violation of its
laws.

U.S. District Judge Kevin Castel
said in an order that a hearing on Wednesday made him question assumptions the
government made in asking to seize the dinosaur bones. Federal agents took the
fossil in June from a storage facility in New York and will hold it until its
fate is determined by the courts.

The judge gave the government until
Sept. 21 to explain better why it is entitled to keep the Tyrannosaurus bataar
skeleton, called Ty. The U.S. government intervened on behalf of Mongolia after
the skeleton was sold at auction by Dallas-based auction house Heritage
Auctions for $1.05 million.

Attorney Michael McCullough, who
represents a Gainesville, Fla., fossils dealer, has said his client is entitled
to keep the creature he spent a year putting together at great expense.
McCullough told the judge on Wednesday that the government was incorrect when
it alleged that the skeleton pieces were brought into the country in one
$15,000 shipment. He said there were three other shipments and only 37 percent
of the completed skeleton came from one specimen. He did not immediately return
a message seeking comment Friday.

The mix of dinosaur parts caused the
judge to refer to the skeleton on Wednesday as a “kind of Frankenstein
model of a dinosaur” and to question whether the multiple parts make it
more difficult to defend where it originated.

In Friday”s order, the judge said
there was “a serious question of whether the government has alleged
sufficiently detailed facts supporting a reasonable belief” that the
dinosaur pieces originated in the Nemegt Basin in the Gobi Desert in Mongolia
or whether the dinosaur might have roamed the bordering territory in China as
well.

The judge noted that the government
maintains that substantially complete skeletons of Tyrannosaurus bataars have
only been found in Mongolia but did not dispute claims by McCullough that less
than full skeletons have been found elsewhere.

He also said some of the laws relied
upon by the government require that the person bringing property into the
United States know it has been stolen if it was stolen.

A government spokeswoman did not
immediately respond to a request for comment Friday.

Associated Press