The curious case of Mongolia’s missing dinosaur fossil and how it made its way home
- Unearthed by poachers in the 2000s, the Halszkaraptor escuilliei is a unlike anything seen before
- Having changed hands a number of times across continents, it is finally ready to return
Desolate and beautiful, southern Mongolia’s Gobi Desert is a vast, treeless expanse, with few permanent settlements and even fewer paved roads. It was here, amid the crumbling outcrops of a fossil site known as Ukhaa Tolgod, that the poachers struck.
The thieves would have worked methodically, digging out a half-metre-long block of soft red sandstone containing the whitish bones of a small dinosaur. They likely doused the skeleton with superglue, a crude substitute for the substances that palaeontologists use to harden and protect fossilised bone. Then they probably wrapped the block in hessian and plaster, loaded it into a four-wheel-drive truck, and drove away, leaving smashed pieces of bone and bottles of superglue strewn across the desert.
They had something valuable in their possession, that much the poachers would have known. What they could not have guessed was that it would turn out to be such a sensational discovery. Nor could they have known the epic journey this fossil would take around the world, passing through the hands of criminals, dealers and scientists – only to end up right back where it began, in Mongolia, a decade later.
One reason the country is such a hotbed for fossil poaching is that unlike most places, it has great tracts of exposed Cretaceous rock in areas devoid of vegetation. Dinosaur bones are abundant here, and relatively easy to find. It is impossible to say exactly how many have been smuggled out of the country since the trade began in the 1990s, says Bolortsetseg Minjin, a Mongolian palaeontologist based in New York, in the United States. She estimates that at least “hundreds of partial or complete dinosaur skeletons have been poached, as well as thousands of other fragmentary remains and eggs”.
The first obstacle that the Ukhaa Tolgod poachers would have faced was getting their bounty out of the country. Philip Currie, a palaeontologist at the University of Alberta, in Canada, who has worked in the Gobi for decades, says a good bet is that they were hidden in trucks carrying coal mined in Mongolia to China. “We think they are loaded into the back of the coal trucks and buried,” he says.
