Hello, thanks for listening to the witness history podcast from the BBC World Service with

Medial Curzley. I'm taking you back to 2012 when a restraining order was put on a dinosaur

skeleton and that same dinosaur skeleton was a defendant in a court case.

Well, good morning and sign by new as they say in Mongolian. Today we do something extraordinary.

We return to the people of Mongolia, a 70 million year old dinosaur that was looted from the

rocky sands of the Gobi Desert. It is a tyrannosaurus batar and under Mongolian law,

never should have left the country, yet here it is before you. How did this happen? Well,

fraud and misrepresentation, that's how. It's like a movie for me when I think back.

You know, I'm just thinking, oh, I'm a scientist, I'm going to

describe some new species of dinosaurs or just, you know, writing papers and all that, but then

things turn all different directions. Meet Dr. Baza Titsik Minjin. She's a Mongolian paleontologist

who'd been trying to raise awareness about Mongolian dinosaur skeletons being sold illegally abroad.

This story starts in a coffee shop. On May 17, 2012, Baza Titsik was having her lunch close to

the American Museum of Natural History in New York, where she works. During my lunch break,

I did see a screen that was hanging from ceiling in that coffee shop. I saw a picture of a dinosaur,

but I could not hear any voice out of that screen. I just assumed it was some kind of new species

of dinosaur, but then I was wondering what was that. That evening, when she got home,

Baza Titsik was still curious about the photograph of the dinosaur skeleton she'd seen on the TV,

so she checked on the internet. I was able to find the same picture of a dinosaur I saw on that

TV screen, and I find out that was actually... I mean, they call it Tyrannosaurus Batar. It's going

to be auction on May 20th. That is actually Sunday. When I look at the image, coloration of bone

really struck out. Usually, the Tyrannosaurus dinosaur found from North American,

...