The trade in stolen dinosaur fossils
In the summer of 2007, at the IM Chait auction house in Beverly Hills, California, actor Nicolas Cage had his eyes on a frightening prize: the 67-million-year-old skull of a Tyrannosaurus bataar, a close relative of the T. rex. It was described as a world-class specimen; the largest ever offered at auction, and its mouth, wide open, showcased razor-sharp teeth.
By the time the hammer came down on the wooden podium, Cage had outbid fellow actor Leonardo DiCaprio by phone, paying $276,000 for what The Telegraph described at the time as a "ferocious-looking addition to his fossil collection". What Cage didn't know then was that the skull may have been imported into the US illegally and it would eventually be at the heart of one of the biggest cases of dinosaur smuggling the US has ever seen. Now, Cage's T. bataar could also be among several fossils that ICE, the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement division, aims to seize as part of its investigation.
At the time of the sale, David Herskowitz, then-director of IM Chait's natural history department, told the New York Times that he obtained the specimen from a collector in Florida but didn't reveal his name. Now Herskowitz acknowledges that man was Eric Prokopi, who, six years on, faces 17 years in prison for falsifying customs documents to import illegally obtained fossils from Mongolia. In addition to Cage's dinosaur head, the specimens Prokopi imported included a huge and 75-per-cent-complete T. bataar skeleton that sold at auction in New York in 2012 for $1million (£620,000). Amid chaotic scenes, lawyers on behalf of the Mongolian president insisted the sale could not go ahead on the grounds that the dinosaur had been stolen. Our dinosaurs are part of our national heritage, the lawyers said, and the property of Mongolia; they cannot just be ripped out of the ground by avaricious fossil hunters and sold to the highest bidder.
In fact, Prokopi's fossils were the tip of a very large iceberg. Poachers have been operating in Mongolia and other dinosaur-rich countries, like China and Argentina, for years. Travelling on motorbikes and armed with crude digging tools, they wait until the coast is clear, then descend on sites often identified by legitimate palaeontologists and divest them of any bones they think valuable.
"We know they've been there," says palaeontologist Mark Norell, a veteran of more than 20 digs in Mongolia's Gobi desert, "because these sites are in the middle of nowhere and when we return to them there's trash everywhere, and chunks of fossils just discarded, along with beer cans."
The looters then sell the fossils to middle men who arrange for them to be smuggled out of the country to Europe, America, Japan and other parts of the world where they're sold at auction houses, antique fairs or fossil shows, or over the internet. Go to the auction site eBay on any given day and you will see somewhere in the region of 4,000 prehistoric fossils for sale, ranging from Oviraptor eggs and T. rex teeth to Diplodocus legs and Velociraptor claws, many of them of questionable legality. On a Thursday afternoon earlier this month, one seller on eBay.com was offering the skull of a T. rex, found in the Gobi desert, for $300,000 ("or best offer"). There were precious few additional details on the listing. Such items could be bought by a museum, but more often than not, are snapped up by wealthy individuals who want to display them in their homes. Cheaper fossils also appeal to ordinary home owners who are looking for something a little different to put on the mantelpiece.
Of course, the items could be perfectly legal, but, with so much money at stake, dealers are prepared to flout international laws to sell illicit bones to wealthy customers who have no idea what the regulations are and know only the bare minimum about how fossils are collected.
From time to time, the authorities hit back. In 2005, police in Australia seized $6million worth of fossils, all illegally imported from China. And, in 2006, agents from the US Department of Homeland Security seized four tons of contraband - including fossilised crabs, pine cones and dinosaur eggs - at the Tucson Gem and Mineral Show in Arizona. An expert confirmed all the items were from Argentina and they were repatriated two years later.
But, before last year, nobody had had the audacity to try and sell a near-complete illicit dinosaur skeleton in full view of the public at a mainstream auction house.
If the sale had gone through, Prokopi would have made around $350,000, after other parties had taken their cut. After years of scraping a living selling anatomical fragments such as sloth claws and dinosaur ribs, and cleaning and restoring fossils for small museums and nature centres, the T. bataar was Prokopi's shot at the big time and he had spent 18 months preparing the specimen in a 5,000 sq ft workshop at the home he shared with his wife and two children in Florida.
Unfortunately for Prokopi, news of the forthcoming sale, at Heritage Auctions in New York, raised the hackles of a Mongolian palaeontologist called Bolortsetseg Minjin. Based in New York, Bolor, as she's known, had been trying for years to persuade the Mongolian government that it needed to do more to protect the country's fossils. Aside from the obvious scientific importance, she argued there was a potential economic benefit in the form of tourism; her dream was to build a natural history museum in Mongolia. But the problem of looters at excavation sites was getting worse.
When Bolor saw a report about Prokopi's specimen on a local TV news programme, she immediately picked up the phone to a politician friend back in Mongolia. "We have to do something about this," she told her. In a flurry of activity, two world experts in Mongolian dinosaurs were enlisted to write open letters condemning the auction. An online petition was signed by a collection of palaeontologists, geologists, students and Mongolians and, on the Friday before the auction, lawyers for the Mongolian government persuaded a judge to grant a temporary restraining order, forbidding Heritage from auctioning the T. bataar.
When the auction went ahead the next day, in defiance of the judge, protesters gathered outside holding banners which read, "National Heritage Is Not For Sale" and "Return Our Stolen Treasure".
Inside, Robert Painter, a Houston-based attorney representing Mongolia, tried to get the auction stopped. "I hate to interrupt this," he said, as the auctioneer called for an opening bid of $875,000, "but I have the judge on the phone." According to a report in the New Yorker magazine, Painter and Heritage's president Greg Rohan then squared off before a security guard escorted Painter to the rear of the auction floor. Finally, as a lawyer for Heritage spoke to the judge on Painter's BlackBerry, the dinosaur sold to an anonymous phone bidder for nearly $1million.
The law regarding ownership of fossils differs from country to country. In the UK, they are normally treated as "minerals" and, thus, ownership of fossils lies with the person who owns the mineral rights to the land on which the fossil is found. In America, ever since a Sioux rancher won the right to sell fossils found on his land and went on to auction a skeleton of a T. rex, in 1997, for a staggering $8.4million, fossil-hunting has become an expensive activity. Ranchers now sell the rights to any fossils that may be found on their land to the highest bidder.
As, a result, people have started looking farther afield, to countries where the law is not so rigorously applied. Mongolia prohibits the personal ownership of items of cultural significance, such as dinosaur remains, and is also a signatory to a UN convention prohibiting the "illicit import and export of cultural property". However, an area like the Gobi desert, with its vast, remote landscape, is not only difficult to police but also includes an expanse of sandstone - known as the Nemegt Formation - which is one of the top two dinosaur sites in the world, in terms of diversity of specimens. It has proved irresistible to black-market dealers.
Whether Prokopi himself ever dug for fossils in the Gobi is unclear, but, as soon as the auctioneer brought down his gavel on the $1million bid, the transaction was put on hold and a formal request was made to the American government by the president of Mongolia, Tsakhia Elbegdorj, to investigate the specimen's provenance.
In June, it was examined by three scientists who confirmed it was from Mongolia. Two weeks later it was confiscated by the Southern District of New York, on behalf of Mongolia, and detectives started building their case against Prokopi. It was established that many of the T. bataar bones, including the skull, arrived in the US in three crates weighing nearly 3,000lbs, allegedly via a dealer called Chris Moore, based on Britain's Jurassic Coast, and listing the shipment's country of origin as Great Britain.
A Mongolian palaeontologist gave a sworn police statement saying that he had helped Prokopi dig for fossils in the Gobi in June 2009. And an examination of his computer revealed numerous emails discussing the buying and selling of "Tarbos" - T. bataars - and "Mongol fossils".
Agents also discovered that, on one fossil shipment, Prokopi had changed the country of origin from Mongolia to Japan. In his only statement to the media, Prokopi denied he was a thief.
"I'm just a guy… trying to support my family, not some international bone smuggler," he said. "If I believed it wasn't legal for me to have or sell this dinosaur, why would I have offered it in such a public format? The lost sale of this dinosaur has irreparably devastated my family financially, it has cost several people their jobs, taken an emotional toll on my wife and two young children and damaged my reputation as a commercial palaeontologist. What will we tell our kids? How will we keep going? I'm headed toward total financial ruin."
But Prokopi's protestations cut little ice. On the morning of October 17 last year, more than 20 law enforcement officers descended on his house in Gainesville, Florida, and arrested him on three counts involving smuggling from both Mongolia and China. While they were there - in a bit of bad timing for Prokopi - a truck turned up with a delivery of some more fossils, an Oviraptor, from Mongolia.
Two months later, the palaeontologist pleaded guilty, admitting that he had imported fossils with "vague" and "misleading" labels. Nothing more about how the fossils had been found or removed from Mongolia was revealed.
The US attorney prosecuting the case described Prokopi as a "a one-man black market in prehistoric fossils". Prokopi's attorney, Georges Lederman, who has instructed his client not to talk to the media, says he will likely be sentenced in the spring but that the investigation is not over. It's understood that more Mongolian dinosaur fossils are due to be seized. Among them could be the skull sold by Prokopi at auction in 2007 and bought by Nicolas Cage, and a third T. bataar skeleton, thought to be at large in the UK.
Chris Moore, the British fossil hunter who allegedly sent the T. bataar bones to America, is not facing legal proceedings in the US and has surrendered all fossils in his possession that were connected with the case, for their eventual repatriation to Mongolia.
However, Moore could still be investigated by the British authorities. Chris McGowan, a British palaeontologist working in Canada, knows Moore. In his 2001 book The Dragon Seekers, about fossil hunting, he thanks local collectors in the Lyme Regis region, including Moore, and says they are "exemplary of what professional fossil collecting can and should be". "Some commercial dealers are quite unscrupulous in flaunting collecting restrictions and export regulations," he wrote. "[But] most of the Dorset collectors make every effort to sell significant fossils - those that may be new species or that are rare - to British museums."
I contacted McGowan to see what he had to say about Moore's involvement in the Prokopi case. Now retired, he said he hadn't heard anything about the T. bataar sale at the New York auction house or Moore's alleged part in it. "Sometimes the line gets blurred between what is OK and what isn't," he told me. "You may do a little bit and it is OK, so you do a bit more. But when it comes to these sorts of fossils, they get such huge amounts of money that's got to be a large part of the story."
Moore is still operating his business - Forge Fossils - in Charmouth. An Ichthyosaurus he prepared in his workshop is about to go under the hammer at an auction in the UK in November. Moore declined to speak to me for this story.
Herskowitz, the fossil broker who arranged the auction of Prokopi's T. bataar, thinks commercial palaeontology is given a rough ride. He doesn't defend the actions of looters, who hack fossils out of the ground without taking soil samples, measuring the depth at which bones are found or recording what other species are found at the same site. But he believes fossil hunters in America are doing science a huge favour.
"Every major fossil discovery in the last 100 years was through commercial palaeontology," he tells me by phone from his home in Dallas, Texas. "A lot of people who discover these things are weekend warriors; families who go out looking. And if we don't take them out of the ground they'll be destroyed anyway [by natural erosion]." But aren't museums missing out? Herskowitz says the majority of his private clients who own great specimens open their doors to the public anyway. "And the twist is this: say you're John Rockefeller and you buy a T. rex for your private study. The chances are when you pass away your family will end up donating that fossil to a museum anyway."
He also defends Prokopi. "In my view, Mongolian law still has not been defined because the Prokopi case never went to trial." Herskowitz contends that all Mongolia's existing laws went out the window in the 1990 Democratic Revolution which ended Communist rule in the country. "The whole legal system changed," he says. "And besides, it was the Mongolians themselves who were digging [fossils] and exporting them." Besides which, Herskowitz says, if you're going to sell contraband, why do it in full view of the public at a well-publicised auction in New York? "In the last 20 years, Mongolian fossils have been front and centre in the fossil industry. People haven't been selling these things in parking lots or back rooms. In my auction catalogues I've had three or four Mongolian fossils on the front cover."
I ask Herskowitz if he thinks Nicolas Cage's T. bataar skull, a fossil which he brokered, will be seized as part of the Prokopi investigation. "I have no idea," he says. "Of course there's a chance, but I consider him [Cage] an end user and it's highly unlikely."
What's more, he adds, if Cage's expensive ornament was confiscated, the actor has enough money to sue. "I always thought if Eric Prokopi could afford to retain good lawyers he'd have won, but he ran out of money. The question concerning the legality of bringing fossils out of Mongolia was never settled." Cage's publicist didn't respond to questions from The Telegraph.
Herskowitz concedes the industry is on the back foot because of the Prokopi case. "It's concerned because when the government decides to go on these witch hunts it's very intrusive." As for Prokopi, Lederman, his attorney, says the investigation has nearly destroyed his life. "He's bankrupt and he was never a wealthy man to begin with; the government seized all his inventory. He has got divorced and the stress of this case has been a factor in that. What little money he does have, and earns from creating dinosaur replicas, he uses to pay child support. But he's unable to pay most of his other bills and he faces foreclosure on his home."
The fact remains there are still fossils openly for sale in the US that were excavated and exported illegally. During the raid on Prokopi's premises, officials seized his laptop. As one palaeontologist with knowledge of the investigation put it: "Who knows what was on his hard drive?"
In May, Prokopi's T. bataar was handed back to the Mongolians by ICE director John Morton in a repatriation ceremony at a Manhattan hotel.
"This is one of the most important repatriations of fossils in recent years," he said. "We undo a great wrong by returning this priceless dinosaur skeleton to the people of Mongolia." It is now on display in a newly created national Mongolian dinosaur museum. The reaction, says Bolortsetseg Minjin, has been "sensational", with more than 500,000 visitors in just four months. "Everyone in Mongolia wanted to see it," she says. "It was a matter of great pride for the whole nation."
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