15 February 2020 | New Scientist | 41or some such on customs forms, he says.
At a certain point in its mysterious journey,
the plaster-encased fossil would have been
taken to a workshop, where a preparator
employed by the smugglers cleaned off
some of the hastily applied superglue as well
as part of the rock and sediment encasing the
fossil. With the skeleton now half exposed
for the first time since the animal died tens
of millions of years ago, the poachers got
a proper look at their swag: the remains
of a weird goose-sized dinosaur, with
sharp claws and bird-like features.
In about 2010, the fossil surfaced in Europe.
It arrived with a fossil dealer in the UK and
also went on display in October 2011 at the
Munich Fossil Show in Germany. It was
photographed, and even briefly appeared
on eBay. A buzz was beginning to build.
One of those who noticed it was François
Escuillié, the owner of Eldonia, a fossil
dealership in France. As well as trading in
fossils, he has made a habit of buying
important black market specimens and
donating them to museums so they can be
studied. “This guy has lost a lot of money,”When a bizarre fossil smuggled out of Mongolia
appeared for sale, dinosaur detectives launched
an investigation to see if it was real, and what it
might actually be. John Pickrell retraces their steps
D
ESOLATE 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
probably 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, that much
the poachers knew. What they couldn’t have
guessed was that it would turn out to such be
a sensational dinosaur 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. She estimates that at least “hundreds
of partial or complete dinosaurs skeletons
have been poached, as well as thousands
of other fragmentary remains and eggs”.
The first obstacle that the Ukhaa Tolgod
poachers 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
>XUANYU HAN/GETTY IMAGESA swan-like
dinosaur fossil
(opposite) was
said to have
been stolen from
the Gobi desertgood bet is that they were hidden in lorries
carrying coal mined in Mongolia to China.
“We think they are loaded into the back
of the coal trucks and buried,” he says.
The law says all fossils are the property
of the Mongolian state and digging them up
or exporting them without a permit is illegal.
But when an excellent specimen can sell for
$100,000 or more to overseas collectors
and the poachers might get roughly a tenth
of that, the risk of fines or prison is nowhere
near enough to put them off.Genuinely weird
The best way to piece together what might
have unfolded next is to look at what happened
to another poached Mongolian fossil:
a hunchbacked, duck-billed dinosaur with
huge claws called Deinocheirus. In that case,
intel from the private collector who acquired
it suggests that it passed from China to Japan,
then to France and Germany. An important
part of the smugglers’ skill set is moving
fossils around in an untraceable way, says
Currie. They often list them as “rocks”