The U.S. government seized a rare
dinosaur skeleton Friday in what observers for the Mongolian
government and a dinosaur expert called an important step toward
returning the skeleton to its home in Mongolia.

Wooden crates holding pieces of the Tyrannosaurus
bataar fossil were loaded onto a white truck at a Queens storage centre
shortly before it was driven away to a facility whose location was not
disclosed.

“We are one step closer to bringing this rare Tyrannosaurus bataar
skeleton back home to the people of Mongolia,” Mongolia
President Elbegdorj Tsakhia said in a statement handed out by his
Houston lawyer, Robert Painter, who took photographs of the seizure through a
chain-link fence outside the Cadogan Tate Fine Art property where it had been
stored.

“Today we send a message to looters all over the world: We will not
turn a blind eye to the marketplace of looted fossils,” he said.

Bolortsetseg Minjin, director of the Institute for the Study of Mongolian
Dinosaurs, took pictures of the exchange as well, saying: “It”s a very
exciting event. It”s just unbelievable. I never expected it would be this
fast.”

The seizure was ordered by a federal judge in Manhattan earlier this week
after the United States requested it in a lawsuit, saying the relics had been
brought into the country with documents that disguised the potentially valuable
dinosaur skeleton that originated in Mongolia as reptile bones from Great
Britain.

Eric Prokopi, 37, of Gainesville, Florida,
defended his handling of the skeleton in a statement Thursday, saying he was
not an international bone smuggler and that he had worked since bringing the
bones into the country in March 2010 to turn chunks of rocks and broken bones “into an impressive skeleton”
that he came to call “Ty.”

“I can wholeheartedly say the import documents are not fraudulent, a
truth I am confident will be brought to light in the coming weeks,” he
said. “The value was declared much lower than the auction value because,
quite simply, it was loose, mostly broken bones and rocks with embedded bones.
It was not what you see today, a virtually complete, mounted skeleton.”

The bones were valued on import documents at only $15,000, but the skeleton
Prokopi put together sold at auction last month for $1.052 million, contingent
on the outcome of litigation involving the dinosaur.

Although the buyer has not been disclosed, Painter said he had been told
that a New York private gallery owner had made the winning bid.

Prokopi responded to an email request for comment Friday by writing:
“My reaction to the government driving away with my dinosaur in a large
white truck is the reaction I imagine Indiana Jones had to the ark being put
into storage at the end of his film.”

After the seizure Friday, Glenn Sorge, a deputy special agent in charge of
Homeland Security Investigations for the Department of Homeland Security in New
York, said the dinosaur “is now in the custody of the U.S. government and
will be stored in a secure location.”

The dinosaur was taken from the custody of Heritage Auctions, a Dallas-based
company. Its co-chairman, Jim Halperin, said Friday that the company will
continue to work with Prokopi.

“We hope arrangements can be made for the public to view it as a museum
or other convenient venue while our efforts continue to reach a fair and just
resolution for our consignor, who had spent a year of his life and considerable
expense identifying, restoring, mounting and preparing what had previously been
a much less valuable matrix of unassembled, underlying bones and bone
fragments,” he said.

The Tyrannosaurus Bataar was a dinosaur from
the late Cretaceous period, approximately 70 million years ago, the government
said in its lawsuit. It was first discovered in 1946 during a joint
Soviet-Mongolian expedition to the Gobi Desert in the Mongolian Ömnögovi
Province. Mongolia has enacted laws since 1924 declaring dinosaur fossils to be the property of the government
of Mongolia and criminalizing their export from the country.

Mark Norell, head paleontologist with New York”s American Museum of Natural
History, was not at the seizure but said in a telephone interview that he was
one of several people to spread word about the dinosaur”s planned sale at
auction. He challenged Prokopi”s claim that the skeleton may have come from
outside Mongolia, saying only some fragments of the same species of dinosaur
had been found in adjacent China but no complete skeletons. He noted also that
China”s laws regarding excavation were stricter than Mongolia”s.

He said Prokopi was inaccurate when he claimed the skeleton was
professionally excavated and had lost some claws and teeth from the weather and
that some teeth had slipped out before burial.

“That”s just not the case,” he said. “I”ve excavated fossils
my entire adult career. Teeth and claws are about the last things to erode
because they”re so hard,” he said.

Minjin said the skeleton was one of only 10 to 15 full skeletons of the
Tyrannosaurus bataar to exist worldwide.

“Finding this kind of complete skeleton is very rare, very
special,” she said.

Fredrik T. Hiebert, an archaeologist with National Geographic mission
programs who attended the seizure, said the likelihood that the dinosaur will
end up in Mongolia was vital to the country bordered by China and Russia.

“This is a bigger story than just a dinosaur. It”s part of the cultural
identity of Mongolia,” he said, noting that the nation was re-establishing
its identity after decades of Soviet control that ended just over two decades
ago.

Still, he said there was no denying the dinosaur had gained a measure of
fame. “It”s become a rock star, pardon the pun.”

Source: www.washingtonpost.com