A Florida fossil dealer who prepared the skeleton of a tyrannosaur and attempted to sell it at auction, questions assertions that the fossils were taken illegally from Mongolia, and says the dispute over its ownership has brought financial ruin on his family.
"Imagine watching your house burn down with everything you have in it and knowing you have no insurance," Eric Prokopi, a commercial fossil dealer based in Gainesville, Fla., writes in a lengthy statement issued to reporters today (June 22).
The lost sale of the dinosaur has been devastating, he writes.
The process of preparing the skeleton — which federal agents took into protective custody earlier today — took "thousands of hours and every penny my wife and I had," Prokopi writes.
The two transformed "chunks of rocks and a bunch of broken bones" into an 8-feet-tall and 24-feet-long (2.4 by 7.3-meters) skeleton that went up for public auction through Heritage Auctions on May 20. Mongolian President Elbegdorj Tsakhia attempted to stop the sale, saying the dinosaur, a species called both Tyrannosaurus bataar and Tarbosaurus bataar, was almost certainly taken illegally from his country.
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