The illegal sale of dinosaur bones is a sophisticated business, involving foreign contacts with links to wealthy clients around the world. However, a recent case, involving the bones of a rare plant-eating dinosaur from the Cretaceous was anything but sophisticated!

The criminal in question allegedly tried to sell the bones to the Mongolian police, who promptly arrested him.  The 36 year-old man from Khuvsgul province had been keeping the dinosaur bones in a summer house in the Songinokhairkhan district of Ulaanbaatar. It is reported that he tried to sell the treasures to officers from the local district police department.

The police handed the dinosaur bones over to the Institute of Paleontology and Geology of the Mongolian Academy of Sciences, where they were identified as belonging to a Protoceratops, which was a sheep-sized plant-eater that lived 80 million years ago.