THE plunder of important fossil sites has long been a source of frustration to scientists, but now a University of New England paleontologist is about to embark on a mission aimed at repairing some of the damage caused by these profiteers and the clients who will pay anything for a piece of history.
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Dr Phil Bell will leave for Mongolia in a few weeks where he'll join other experts from there, Italy and Canada in a special project to repatriate dinosaur bones illegally taken from sites across Mongolia's famed Gobi Desert.
The desert has been an epicentre of dinosaur discovery since the 1920’s and even today, thanks to erosion and shifting sands, it continues to offer up major finds that shed more light on the giants who once dominated the planet.
"There's a long history of paleontological exploration in the Gobi Desert and it's still yielding fantastic skeletons of all sorts of dinosaurs," said Dr Bell, who's been to Mongolia twice before.
"But it's also spurned interest from a seedier underbelly."
Notably fossil poachers for whom scientific discovery isn't the main motiviation and who sell to the highest bidder.
Dr Bell said the black market in dinosaur bones had become particularly problematic in the past two decades, with treasure hunters once most interested in teeth, claws and skulls, now turning their attention to whole skeletons, and using any means they can, including explosives, to extricate them from the earth.
"It's getting to the point where you can't find a skeleton that hasn't been hacked out of the ground," he said.
The remains are then taken across the Mongolian border or to the capital Ulaanbaatar, many finding their way into private collections in the US and Europe.
In the past few years though Dr Bell said there had been a push to return poached fossils, and many pieces had found their way back to Mongolia in recent times.
A new natural history museum in the country has only fuelled the desire to get these dinosaur remains back to their rightful home.
But, the return of these ancient relics - "a lot of them are priceless artifacts - irreplaceable" - is only the first step.
The way they were taken in the first place means there's no data on where they were found, presenting a big problem for paleontologists.
As Dr Bell says, "a fossil has no worth if there's no location information".
That's where Dr Bell's latest project comes in.
They will spend three weeks mapping a number of key fossil localities in the Gobi Desert in an effort to determine the origin of returned fossils.
Dr Bell said up until now, in some cases they'd been relying on hand-drawn maps dating back to the 1960’s, so the use of drone technology will be of great assistance in updating these vital resources.
The second part of the exercise is the use of hand-held xray devices to determine the unique chemical make-up of each fossil.
