For buyers interested in owning prehistoric natural objects, dinosaur fossils like skulls and complete skeletons can add an impressive bit of the Cretaceous to their portfolios. As I walked through the dimmed entry hall backlit with the museum’s name in lights, it occurred to me that the long-dead and almost-trafficked dinosaur has a lot of life left to live.Įver since the 1997 sale of Sue for a then-unprecedented $7.6 million, fossils have proven to be an extremely lucrative luxury market. Five years and 6,000 miles later, that very same dinosaur fossil found itself back in Mongolia, now an icon symbolizing Mongolian and American efforts to combat the illicit fossil trade in Central Asia. In 2012, the Tarbosaurus was very nearly sold at auction in New York, despite such a sale violating Mongolian law as well as a temporary restraining order by a U.S. In downtown Ulaanbaatar, on a pedestal in the Central Museum of Mongolian Dinosaurs, stands a 70-million-year-old Tarbosaurus bataar dinosaur from the southern Gobi Desert.
