By Meagan Day

Jun Yang, a 36-year-old man from British Columbia, was just sentenced to probation for smuggling 17 dinosaur fossils from China to the US, one of which was 100 million years old.

Why the light sentence? It’s partly because Jun Yang is small potatoes, as far as dinosaur fossil smugglers go. China and Mongolia are experiencing a massive surge in fossil poaching, and the US is seeing an influx of smugglers’ spoils. Most of the excavation is being carried out by impoverished people in rural areas who are left behind by rapid urbanization, which started in the 1990s and has only intensified in recent years. Changing socioeconomic conditions in China and Mongolia are compelling farmers to trade ploughs for pickaxes, and go in search of prehistoric remains.

Dinosaur fossils bring a pretty penny on the black market — but they are priceless to the scientific community. The rise in fossil poaching alarms paleontologists, who consider it a major threat to their discipline. When excavated carelessly by amateurs, and without any recorded data by trained scientists, the fossils become essentially invalid as scientific specimens.

Mark Norell, chairman of paleontology at the American Museum of Natural History, told Smithsonian Magazine that commercial diggers “don’t care about the site where the fossil sits, how it’s oriented in the earth, what can be found around it to give us clues to what the world was like when that fossil animal died.” They “want only to get the specimen out of the ground and get paid — so we lose the context of the site as well as the fossil itself.”

Amateur excavators sell their discoveries to underground traders, who bring them to fossil showcases like the annual Tucson Gem & Mineral Show, where they are purchased by other traders or private collectors. The Arizona event is where Jun Yang was nabbed, and it was also the inspiration for the fossil poaching career of Eric Prokopi, a “one-man black market” for dinosaur bones. He mostly foraged for shark teeth along the Florida coast until the dinosaur fossils on display in Tucson caught his eye. “Illicit materials often turn up at the Tucson show,” notes The New Yorker, adding that “the events are rarely policed.”

Prokopi was captured in 2012. He cooperated with police, and the information he provided on the fossil poaching scene has led to a continuing series of subsequent arrests. Enough dinosaur fossils have been recovered using Prokopi’s insider information to populate a new dinosaur museum in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia. Mongolia celebrated the return of one of Prokopi’s specimens, a nearly complete skeleton of a cousin of Tyrannosaurus rex, by declaring the date to be national Dinosaur Day.

With the recovered fossils flowing in, the Mongolian government is hoping to see a boost in dinosaur-related tourism. As beneficial as that is for Mongolia, it doesn’t help paleontologists. There’s no way to recover all the data lost in the amateur extraction process, and the fossils typically become inadmissible in peer-reviewed studies. “When a beautiful fossil that has high scientific value is purchased by a collector for their personal enjoyment,” writes scientist Mika McKinnon, “that scientific utility is lost to the entire planet.”

Entrance to the “Gobi Tour” in southern Mongolia, where important dinosaur fossils have been found. © Wolfgang Kaehler/Getty

While crackdowns on smugglers are becoming more frequent, they’re not necessarily keeping pace with the growing illegal fossil trade. Jun Yang’s specimens, which were shipped from China inside cargo containers, were spotted on open display at the Tucson show. But as international surveillance of the illegal fossil trade intensifies, poachers are likely to start avoiding such risky displays of their contraband.

As rural socioeconomic conditions worsen, more and more Chinese farmers and Mongolian nomads are starting new careers as amateur bone excavators. Smugglers will certainly devise more covert ways of selling their loot on the black market, if they haven’t already.