May 7, 2013

Dino skeleton returned to Mongolia - In the Loop - The Washington Post

Dino skeleton returned to Mongolia - In the Loop - The Washington Post: "Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) might have taken a lot of flak of late for freeing a bunch of detainees.

But in one celebrated instance, it was able to remove one particularly ferocious creature from our shores. Nevermind that the Tyrannosaurus Bataar that the U.S. government returned to Mongolia had been dead for some 70 million years.

During a repatriation ceremony, ICE officials on Monday gave back a raptor skeleton, which had been looted from the Gobi desert, smuggled to the U.S. and sold at auction for more than a million bucks a by self-described “commercial paleontologist” from Florida. “We cannot allow the greed of a few looters and schemers to trump the cultural interests of an entire nation,” ICE Director John Morton said in a statement."

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