Nicholas Cage to return stolen dinosaur skull

Lederman said that when Prokopi put the fossil up for auction, he believed it to have been legally imported.

“The battery of huge, knife-like, serrated teeth are quite impressive and are in excellent condition”, court papers quoted the auction catalog as saying of a skull that was 65 percent complete.

Unsurprising fact No. 1: Nicolas Cage paid $276,000 for a Tyrannosaurus bataar skull at auction in 2007.

Cage and Wood will play a pair of dodgy cops who attempt to pull off a heist after discovering their local grocery store contains a secret vault stuffed with drug money.

Nicolas Cage may be best known for rescuing treasures or stopping airplanes full of criminals on the silver screen, but he just did something rather cinematic in real life.

The Tyrannosaurus bataar skull Cage bought from I.M. Chait was also from a seller in Florida.

The actor will hand the skull over to USA authorities, then it will be taken to Mongolia.

A civil complaint meant to get the skull back, filed by the US Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of NY, was unsealed just last week. The dinosaur is indigenous to the Gobi Desert in Mongolia.

The Tyrannosaurus bataar resided about 70 million years back and was related to the Tyrannosaurus rex.

The Huffington Post reported that the I.M. Chait gallery has previously sold a dinosaur skeleton from paleontologist Eric Prokopi, who was once called a “one-man black market in prehistoric fossils”.

In recent years, there has been an global effort to return stolen artifacts to their rightful countries-with Mongolia, in particular, receiving many priceless fossils, skeletons, and artifacts taken overseas.

In 1924, Mongolia has criminalized the removal of fossils. The buyer was none other than Nicolas Cage.