The fossilized bones were handed over to Mongolian officials in a repatriation ceremony held July 10 in New York. "Today, we return a veritable nest of dinosaurs," Manhattan U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara said in a statement after the ceremony.
"This is a historic event for the U.S. Attorney's Office, in addition to being a prehistoric event, and we are proud to participate in the return of these dinosaur skeletons to their rightful home," Bharara said.
The road to repatriation began two years ago, in 2012, when an auction house in New York was offering a skeleton of a Tarbosaurus bataar — an Asian cousin of Tyrannosaurus rex. Mongolian authorities voiced concern that the specimen had likely been smuggled into the United States. The 70-million-year-old dinosaur species was native to the Gobi desert in Asia, and to date, has only been found in modern-day Mongolia.
The Tarbosaurus sale attracted a bid of more than $1 million, but the suspicions of the Mongolian authorities sparked a long legal battle and federal investigation. U.S. authorities froze the sale, and after a lengthy custody battle, the specimen was returned to Mongolia in May 2013.
Eric Prokopi, a self-described commercial paleontologist who imported the dinosaur, pleaded guilty to criminal charges that he smuggled the skeleton and other fossils into the United States. In June, Prokopi was sentenced to three months in federal prison.
The other Mongolian fossils forfeited by Prokopi during the case were returned in the July 10 ceremony, including a second Tarbosaurus, oviraptors and skeletons of the duckbilled, plant-eating Saurolophus angustirostris.
Federal authorities also returned fossils that had been forfeited by Christopher Moore, a onetime business partner of Prokopi in the United Kingdom, including a third Tarbosaurus, skeletons of a rooster-like Gallimimus dinosaur and a nest of fossilized eggs, all looted from Mongolia.
Read more at Discovery News
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