Mongolia has returned 29 illegally exported dinosaur fossils
Twenty-nine sets of dinosaur fossils, which had been illegally smuggled out of the country by traffickers about 20 years ago, have been returned to Mongolia.
Among the returned artifacts is a more than half-preserved skeleton of a Tarbosaurus, one of Central Asia’s most famous predatory dinosaurs and a close relative of the Tyrannosaurus rex.
All the fossils have already been delivered to Mongolia’s capital, Ulaanbaatar. Experts will now clean, catalog, and prepare them for museum display.
According to police, the remains were stolen and illegally removed from Mongolia in 2006 for financial gain.
The first specimens were discovered by French customs officials in 2013. Following this, France and Mongolia began the repatriation process in accordance with international legislation on combating the illicit trafficking of cultural property.
The official handover of the artifacts took place in Paris in December 2025.
The returned specimens include fragments of fossils of theropods, ornithomimosaurs, and hadrosaurs.
They lived in what is now the Gobi Desert approximately 65–70 million years ago during the Late Cretaceous period.
The partially preserved skeleton of Tarbosaurus is of particular scientific value. This species was the region’s top predator and could reach over 10 meters in length and weigh more than 5 metric tons.
Some paleontologists believe that Tarbosaurus may not be a separate species, but rather an Asian representative of the Tyrannosauridae family, closely related to Tyrannosaurus rex.
This was reported by the National Museum of Natural History of Mongolia.
Previously, an international team of scientists developed the DinoTracker app, which uses artificial intelligence to identify dinosaurs based on their footprints left tens of millions of years ago. The system is capable of analyzing the shape of a footprint and identifying its unique characteristics, even if the dinosaur itself was never present.
Japanese scientists on the island of Hokkaido have discovered new geological evidence of an asteroid impact that may have been one of the causes of the mass extinction of dinosaurs about 66 million years ago. This is the first such confirmation for Japan, adding new data to the global scientific picture of this ancient catastrophe. The research spanned more than a decade.
