France finds smuggled dinosaur teeth in parcels bound for Italy

France finds smuggled dinosaur teeth in parcels bound for Italy

The smuggled fossils included the tooth of a plesiosaurus, one expert said

French customs officers seized nine dinosaur teeth last month from a courier truck transiting through the country from Spain on its way to Italy, they said on Friday.

The teeth, probably from Morocco, were found during a routine check along a highway running along France's Mediterranean coastline near the Italian border, customs official Samantha Verduron said.

Using sniffer dogs and opening some parcels at random, inspectors have been known to find cannabis or even cocaine among such truckloads of hundreds of parcels travelling from Spain to Italy, she said.

But on January 27, officials from the French border town of Menton found nine enormous teeth in two parcels that were destined for addresses near the Italian cities of Genoa and Milan, French customs said.

An expert at the Menton prehistory museum helped identify the fossils as probably dating back tens of millions of years and originating from what is now Morocco.

They included the tooth of a long-necked marine reptile called a zarafasaura oceanis, a type of plesiosaurus at least 66 million years old first discovered in Morocco.

Some people believe plesiosauruses, which lived in different parts of the globe, inspired the legend of the Loch Ness monster in Scotland.

Three other teeth would have once belonged to a mosasaurus, an extinct aquatic lizard with a long snout.

The remaining five teeth were thought to belong to a dyrosaurus, an ancestor of the crocodile.

- Prized trophies -

Fossils must be authorised for export and without such a licence are usually returned to their country of origin.

An investigation is under way to identify the receivers and decide how to proceed, Verduron said.

In 2020, France returned 25,000 items including fossils, minerals, stones and art objects to Morocco after intercepting them in 2005 and 2006. 

Most had been found during illegal excavations.

In 2015, customs officers in the French city of Lyon found part of the skeleton of a tarbosaurus bataar, a land dinosaur that walked on its hind legs, that had been illegally excavated in Mongolia.

Dinosaur remains have become a hot-ticket item in recent years, with paleontologists voicing concern that museums are losing out to private bidders.

A hedge fund CEO last year spent a record $44.6 million to buy a stegosaurus fossil at a New York auction.

Dinosaurs first appeared at least 230 million years ago, while the first humans are believed to have appeared on Earth only around six million years ago.

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Originally published as France finds smuggled dinosaur teeth in parcels bound for Italy