U.S. court OK’s return of 4 tons, 3 dinosaur eggs seized at gem shows

The federal government has received a judge’s permission for an unusual deportation: three rare Argentinian dinosaur eggs and 4 tons of other fossils.

The fossils were seized after undercover Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents spotted the eggs at the 2006 Tucson Gem, Mineral & Fossil Showcase exhibit of Jose Lopez, of Argentina-based Rhodo Co.

U.S. District Court Judge Raner C. Collins last week granted the U.S. Attorney’s Office’s request to send the fossils back to their homeland.

Argentina enacted a law in 2003 forbidding the sale of its fossils.

After the fossils were seized, Lopez told agents he got them through a barter with another dealer, Hans Koser.

Collins said in his ruling that Argentinian law didn’t recognize Koser’s right to own the fossils, which made the trade with Lopez illegal. Also, Collins said, Lopez didn’t inform the Argentine government that he had the fossils and would export them.

Lopez didn’t contest the forfeiture of the fossils, court records show. He could not be reached for comment.

ICE agents and Arizona State University paleontologists sorted through a warehouse and found barrels and boxes of crab fossils, each of which was wrapped in Argentine newspapers.

One of the eggs sustained a lot of damage when it was extracted crudely from the earth, court records show.

Interpol archaeologist Tammy R. Hilburn, who examined the fossils, said scientific knowledge about the fossils also suffered.

“The items with which it lay for millennia would have revealed a great amount of information, but that information is now lost forever,” Hilburn wrote in court records.

“If it can be determined through investigation where these items were extracted, then more information related to the scientific record can be recovered – a rare occurrence.”

No criminal charges were filed in the case.

Sauropods, or “lizard-hipped” dinosaurs, are believed to be the largest animals that lived on land – some up to 60 feet tall – and lived from 65 million to 180 million years ago.

The Sonorasaurus thompsoni, discovered by an amateur fossil hunter in 1994 in the southern Arizona desert, belongs to the sauropod family. A Sonorasaurus model is on display at the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum, 2021 N. Kinney Road.

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Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum Web site:

www.desertmuseum.org

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 29th, 2007 at 12:01 am and is filed under Local. Tags for this post: A.J. Flick, Crime/Safety, History/Culture, Local-Crime/Safety, Local-History/Culture, page-a14. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.