A fossil collector and US citizen Eric Prokopi has been sentenced in federal court to three months in prison for smuggling dinosaur bones from Mongolia. He confessed to smuggling a number of skeletons of dinosaurs including the skeleton of 70 million years-old Tyrannosaurus Bataar from territory of Mongolia between 2010 and 2012.
Brian Switek, who writes about dinosaurs for National Geographic, said there is a thriving black market for fossils, which can fetch upwards of a million dollars on the private market. It was seized and then retrieved from the US side in May of 2013 at a request of the President of Mongolia Elbegdorj.
Frequently these profit-seeking fossil hunters make aggregate skeletons from various specimens, forge parts of fossils or illegally export them from countries with laws against it, like Mongolia. Eric Prokopi bought parts of three different skeletons of Tyrannosaurus Bataar, a smaller Tyrannosaurus Rex-like predator that roamed parts of Mongolia and China 70 million years ago.
Mongolia has strict laws that prohibit the sale and export of fossil remains except those overseen by the government. When Prokopi put his T. Bataar skeleton up for auction in New York in 2012, it attracted the attention of several paleontologists and the Mongolian government, who were able to stop the auction from going through.