Smuggled dinosaur fossils return to Mongolia after two decades

A Tarbosaurus dinosaur fossil is seen on display during a handover ceremony in Ulaanbaatar, the capital of Mongolia.

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Mongolia has recovered a rare dinosaur skeleton and a trove of fossils illegally exported two decades ago, authorities said Wednesday, concluding years of efforts to return the palaeontological treasures.

The collection includes a Tarbosaurus bataar skeleton, estimated to be more than 50 percent intact, along with 28 groups of fossilised dinosaur remains originally found in Mongolia’s Gobi Desert, according to police.

The bones had been illegally taken from Mongolia in 2006 “with the aim of making a profit”, said D. Munkhkhuyag, head of the police public relations department.

French customs agencies confiscated the fossils between 2013 and 2015, and began returning them a year later to Mongolia under international conventions to combat the illicit trafficking of cultural heritage.

Following the lengthy process of returning the fossils, they arrived in the capital Ulaanbaatar on Thursday and will be housed in Mongolia’s new National Museum of Natural History, where they will be studied and eventually put on public display.

“The dinosaur fossil is priceless and a unique piece of heritage,” Manchuk Nuramkhan, the museum’s director, told a news conference.

Tarbosaurus bataar, a close relative of Tyrannosaurus rex, lived around 70 million years ago, with evidence of its existence almost exclusively found in Mongolia’s Gobi Desert.