Overview
- The collection of 29 fossil sets arrived in Ulaanbaatar on Friday and was delivered to Mongolia’s National Museum of Natural History for processing.
- The trove includes an unusually complete Tarbosaurus bataar skeleton estimated to be more than 50 percent intact, a rare regional relative of Tyrannosaurus rex.
- Mongolian police say smugglers removed the remains in 2006 and French customs first discovered specimens in 2013, with seizures between 2013 and 2015 and a formal handover in Paris in December 2025.
- Museum paleontologists will catalogue, clean, conserve and then prepare the fossils for public display and scientific study, a process that can take months.
- The return highlights how the Gobi Desert’s Late Cretaceous fossils are targeted by black‑market traffickers and shows how international cultural‑heritage law can restore material vital to science and national heritage.