For years, Nicolas Cage has maintained a stellar reputation as Hollywood’s most unpredictable collector. The actor has bought castles, a private island, a haunted mansion, and a pet octopus. So, when he desired to own a dinosaur skull, it was not at all surprising.
In 2007, Cage beat Leonardo DiCaprio in a bidding war for a fossilized Tarbosaurus bataar skull at a Beverly Hills auction. However, the real trouble began after he had bought it. Years later, federal agents told him the skull had likely been smuggled out of Mongolia. What looked like another collector story turned into a full-blown repatriation case. Here’s how it unfolded.
Nicolas Cage Once Beat DiCaprio In A Pricey Auction
The skull went up for sale at the I.M. Chait gallery in Beverly Hills. It belonged to a Tarbosaurus bataar, a large carnivorous dinosaur closely related to Tyrannosaurus rex. Cage and DiCaprio both wanted it, and both bid by phone.
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Cage won, paying $276,000 for the fossil and took it home with a certificate of authenticity from the gallery. On paper, it looked like a legitimate high-end auction purchase, and definitely not the start of a legal mess.
For years, the skull remained with Cage, and it was among the long list of strange things in the actor’s collection. No one publicly questioned the sale at the time. However, the problem sat much further back in the fossil’s chain of ownership. The skull had reached the auction house only after someone had moved it out of Mongolia.
Federal Investigators Traced The Skull To Smuggling
In 2014, the Department of Homeland Security contacted Cage’s representatives. Investigators believed someone had taken the skull from Mongolia illegally. That mattered because Mongolia treats dinosaur fossils as state property.
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It meant that people cannot legally dig them up and sell them abroad as private collectibles. Authorities traced the fossil to Eric Prokopi, a commercial paleontologist tied to a major smuggling case.
Prosecutors said he had helped move dinosaur remains out of the Gobi Desert with forged customs documents. They also stated that he then sold them through the U.S. market and later pleaded guilty to charges tied to the scheme.
That left Cage in an awkward position, but that alone didn’t establish him as a criminal. He had bought the skull through an auction house and had no public role in the smuggling itself. But once investigators identified the fossil as stolen Mongolian property, Cage could not keep it.
Cage Returned The Skull Once The Government Confirmed Its Origins
Cage cooperated with the investigation and agreed to return the fossil. Authorities did not accuse him of wrongdoing or charge him with anything. He had bought the skull in good faith, but that obviously did not change where it came from.
The return cost him a $276,000 collector’s item. It also ended up as one of the strangest celebrity purchase stories of the 2000s. Cage had won the auction, but he did not get to keep the prize.
And that’s probably why the story still sticks. It starts with Nicolas Cage and Leonardo DiCaprio fighting over a dinosaur skull and ends with federal agents taking it back. Even by Cage standards, it is hard to top.
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