Cage apparently outbid Leonardo DiCaprio for the skull, Reuters said, and that may be one competition he wishes he’d lost.
According to the Guardian, last week Preet Bharara, a U.S. Attorney based in Manhattan, filed a complaint to take possession of Cage’s stolen skull.
The actor has not been accused of any crime, and he voluntarily agreed to return the skull to US authorities.
Cage hasn’t been charged with any wrongdoing, according to The Guardian, and was first contact by the U.S. government in 2014, when they suspected that the skull may have been stolen.
While it’s not clear if Prokopi is linked to the stolen skull that turned up at I.M. Chait, the scientific community has long condemned the practice of selling these fossils at private auction.
Following a determination by investigators that the skull in fact had been taken illegally from Mongolia, Cage agreed to hand it over, Mr Schack said. New York NY authorities have returned several fossils to Mongolia in current years of time of time, together with a Tarbosaurus bataar courting back 70 million years of time of time.
Cage’s publicist says the actor was given a certificate of authenticity at purchase.
“I’m surprised Nick Cage didn’t challenge it”, David Herskowitz, a natural history consultant who organized the 2007 sale of the skull, told ABC News. Like its larger cousin, the Tyrannosaurus rex, T. bataar was a carnivore.
Prosecutors in NY described him as “one-man black market in prehistoric fossils”. So far, the remains of said dinosaur have only ever been discovered in Mongolia. Some of those findings include three full Tyrannosaurus bataar skeletons.
Nicolas Cage is losing his head – or rather, a dinosaur skull.