Wednesday 10 October 2012

"Free Tarby" Case Advances

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The attempty to get a Tarbosaurus Bataar skeleton back to Mongolia seems to be making some headway (Rick St Hilaire Bataar Forfeiture Case Intensifies as Motion to Dismiss is Filed and a Second Dinosaur is Seized, 10 Oct 2012). The main interest in the modified complaint is that although the US dealer claims he bought "Tarby" from a UK dealer (who'd been the real exporter who'd later sold it on to him), now it appears that at least two of the shipments of the components of the "same skeleton" entered the US listed as having come from Japan.  The US authorities now claim that the US dealer had himself been in Mongolia, and report that there is a witness statement that he had himself there removed fossil bones from the ground in 2009.  Now another dinosaur has been seized from the same importer (and two years ago there had been another case involving the seizure of a dinosaur fossil reportedly misdescribed  upon import). It's not looking good for the dealer.

I wonder in the light of that, what the evidence is that there was a UK collector? Readers might remember that I remarked a while back that it was very odd that although there were a lot of hits on several posts on the topic on my blog in a certain period from Gainesville Florida, there were none at all from the south coast of England, where this unnamed UK collector/dealer is said to live. I would say that is pretty odd in the circumstances. Once again, I think the key to this case are the assorted bones previously sold by the US dealer on eBay specifically stated to be from the Nemegt Formation which the US authorities are ignoring. 

There was apparently a motion to dismiss posted by the US dealers' lawyers on October 5, 2012 - St Hilaire discusses its contents, but let us see what Peter Tompa himself writes on his blog about it first before commenting, beyond saying that the first bit quoted by St Hilaire has a comic air about it. 

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