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 per cent 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.
A Mongolian official walks past boxes of dinosaur fossils during a handover ceremony in Ulaanbaatar, the capital of Mongolia, on June 11, 2026. —AFP
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.
