A fossil smuggler was sentenced to three months behind bars on Tuesday for bringing the fossil of a T. rex relative into the U.S, the Los Angeles Times reported.
Eric Prokopi, 39, almost got away with the smuggling scheme when he sold the skeleton of a 70 million-year-old Tyrannosaurus bataar at a New York auction house in 2012. But experts realized that the 2-ton fossil's unique color, a sand-like hue, meant that it could only have come from Mongolia.
Prokopi was charged and almost sentenced to 17 years in prison, but he skirted the sentence because he helped authorities recover other fossils that were part of smuggling operations.
A federal judge in Manhattan sentenced Prokopi to three months in jail and about a year of probation, the LA Times reported.
"What I did was wrong, and I failed to appreciate the gravity of what I have done," Prokopi, who lives in Brooklyn, told the judge according to UPI.
Prokopi purchased the T. bataar and several other dinosaur fossils that were dug up in Mongolia's Gobi Desert. He smuggled the fossils into the U.S. and made it all the way to Heritage Auctions in New York where the 8-foot-high, 24-foot-long T. bataar was sold in May 2012.
The $1 million sale was voided and Prokopi was arrested after two paleontologists alerted authorities about the suspicious fossil, UPI reported.
Prokopi pled guilty to charges of conspiracy to smuggle goods into the U.S., entry of goods by means of false statements, and transportation of stolen goods in December 2013, according to The Virginia Gazette. It is illegal for a private citizen to purchase or own fossils from Mongolia. He was not charged with theft because he did not believe it was illegal to do so, the newspaper reported.
The skeleton and other fossils, said to be worth over $200,000, have since been returned to Mongolia.
"These specimens are quite literally of sufficient number to open a museum" Assistant U.S. Attorney Martin S. Bell said in a statement obtained by The Virginia Gazette. "Mongolia is in the process of opening its first-ever such institution based on the dinosaurs recovered in this case alone."
