France to return smuggled dinosaur skeleton to Mongolia

A 70 million-year-old dinosaur skeleton that French customs had confiscated from the Gobi desert was to be given to Mongolia by France on Monday.

In 2015, French authorities confiscated the “extremely rare” specimen of a Tarbosaurus baatar, which is thought to be the Asian relative of the formidable Tyrannosaurus rex.

Later on Monday, Amelie de Montchalin, the minister of public accounts, was scheduled to deliver it together with about thirty other objects, including dinosaur eggs.

Before traveling through South Korea, they had been stolen from the Gobi Desert. In February 2015, customs seized them during a seizure in the central town of Gannat.

“This is an entire Tarbosaurus, estimated at around 700,000 euros when it was seized, but since then the market has exploded, so we could say it is worth two to three times that amount today,” Sophie Hocquerelle, communications manager for French customs, told France 2 television on Sunday.

She described the find as “an exceptional discovery”.

Tarbosaurus bataar lived during the Cretaceous period and disappeared some 65 million years ago.

There have been no specimens of T.bataar reported outside of Asia.

Since American explorer Roy Chapman Andrews, who is credited with inspiring the film Indiana Jones, found dinosaur eggs in Mongolia a century ago, thousands of ancient fossils have vanished from the country.

Since then, both smugglers and paleontologists have flocked to the desert.

In an effort to bring back fossils that have been kept in international museums and private collectors’ curiosity cabinets, the Mongolian government has worked to recover the lost artifacts.

If fossils are not permitted for export, they are usually sent back to their country of origin.

The earliest humans are thought to have arrived on Earth only about six million years ago, but dinosaurs initially appeared at least 230 million years ago.

The largest triceratops skeleton ever discovered, measuring eight meters in length, sold for an incredible 6.6 million euros at a Paris auction in 2021.