The $1 Million Mongolian Tyrannosaur Is Almost Home

Remember the tale of the Mongolian Tarbosaurus bataar (an Asian relative of T. rex) skeleton that mysteriously sold for $1.05 million at auction in the United States? In short, Mongolia barred the sale of rare native antiquities to in 1961, which means that someone smuggled the Tarbosaur out of the country illegally. I chalked it up as just another case of rich folks snatching up nature for their own amusement, and I certainly wasn’t alone.

Buying a prized skeleton — this particular example has been said to be the most complete one ever found — just to stuff it in your mansion is plain wrong, illegal or not. Yeah, we can’t know what the buyer was planning on doing with it, but it’s nigh guaranteed that it wasn’t going to show up in any public museums any time soon. And, in any case, there’s the whole issue of swiping a precious piece of Mongolia’s natural history, and that’s just wrong.

When we last checked in, Heritage Auctions, the auction house behind the sale, was working with the Mongolian government in a Dallas court (Heritage’s home base) to sort out the skeleton’s legal provenance. (Heritage, to its credit, said it would offer up all documents related to the sale.) But, despite that apparent cooperation, a question loomed: How could the skeleton have possibly arrived in the U.S. legally?

As most expected, it seems that the Tarbosaurus didn’t. Monday, the U.S. Attorney’s office in Manhattan filed suit against Heritage, alleging that not only was the fossil illegally collected, but it was illegally imported as well, with numerous customs forms having been falsified.

Why is this double-whammy key? Well, as Heritage had argued, just because the fossil was collected illegally in Mongolia doesn’t mean it couldn’t be legally imported into the U.S., which would then make it legal for sale. As Brian Switek wrote for the Smithsonian:

This Tarbosaurus was collected from Mongolia just a few years ago, in violation of Mongolia's laws. Frustratingly, however, Heritage Auctions maintained that the specimen had been legally imported to the United States. If this were the case, the skeleton could still be legally sold—even if a specimen is illegally collected from its country of origin, lax importation regulations give dinosaur smugglers legal loopholes.

According to the papers filed by the U.S. Attorney, improprieties with the customs forms mean the skeleton was imported illegally, and thus was not allowed to be sold. Those issues include (see the files here) the assertion that the skeleton was excavated in Great Britain before being shipped from England to the U.S. in 2010, which is categorically impossible. Even worse, as Switek notes, the manifest didn’t even mention dinosaur parts, instead listing "two large rough fossil reptile heads, six boxes of broken fossil bones, three rough fossil reptiles, one fossil lizard, three rough fossil reptiles, and one fossil reptile skull."

Thankfully, it looks like those false customs documents are going to be enough to send the Tarbosaurus home. Tuesday a federal judge signed a warrant that gives the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement department the power to seize the skeleton. It’s expected to be picked up tomorrow from a Heritage storage facility in New York state, and will be sent back to Mongolia pending the outcome of the U.S. Attorney’s civil suit, which (knock on wood) looks strong at this point.

Still, the most absurd thing about the whole Tarbosaurus affair is that it even happened in the first place. Vagaries of customs laws and international law conflicts are nothing new. But in a case in which a skeleton was so clearly stolen from its home country and then sold, where, had it not received attention so quickly, it would have quickly disappeared into the private realm, it’s shocking how close the Tarbosaurus still is to being owned by a collector. This is our natural history we’re talking about. It shouldn’t be bought and sold like a trophy, it deserves to be properly displayed and revered for the marvel that it is. Here’s hoping that is indeed what’s about to happen.

Follow Derek Mead on Twitter: @derektmead.

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