Some 70 million years after he roamed the Gobi Desert, Lenny the tyrannosaurus began his journey home yesterday after dinosaur bone looters smuggled him to America.
At a repatriation ceremony in a Manhattan hotel room, senior US legal officials handed back the near-complete skeleton of the 7.3m long, 2.4m tall carnivorous raptor to delighted Mongolian officials.
In a dramatic raid, the tyrannosaurus bataar - a cousin of the T-Rex - had been seized by the authorities from a New York auction house as it was put up for sale for more than US$1 million ($1.17 million).
The skeleton is the first part of a trove of looted Mongolian dinosaur remains that will be returned after an agreement was reached with a British fossil dealer, US prosecutors said.
Chris Moore, who runs Forge Fossils in the Dorset town of Charmouth, recently handed over to the Manhattan district attorney's office a large collection of fossils, including another tyrannosaurus bataar. Moore faces no legal charges in the US. The Mongolian Government said its criminal investigation into his activities would be ended when the fossils were on home soil.
