On a Sunday in May 2012, the fossilized skeleton of an eight-foot-tall T. rex relative called Tarbosaurus bataar went up for auction in New York City. The bidding started at $875,000, but there was a problem: the bones had been poached from Mongolia and were in the United States illegally.
At the New York auction, a lawyer working on behalf of the Mongolian government dialed up a judge and tried to stop the sale. Nearly 1,000 miles away in Florida, Eric Prokopi, the man who had obtained the bones from a Mongolian dealer and painstakingly prepared them, paced the beach where he was celebrating his daughter’s birthday. He was waiting for the auctioneer’s hammer to finalize the sale, and its consequences.
