France on Monday began repatriating a 70-million-year-old dinosaur skeleton to Mongolia, nearly a decade after the fossil was looted from the Gobi Desert and later intercepted by French customs.

The “extremely rare” fossil of a Tarbosaurus Baatar, considered to be the Asian cousin of the fearsome Tyrannosaurus rex, was confiscated in 2015 in the central French town of Gannat after being smuggled through South Korea. Public Accounts Minister Amelie de Montchalin is set to formally hand over the skeleton along with roughly 30 other fossils, including dinosaur eggs.

“This is an entire Tarbosaurus, estimated at around 700,000 euros when it was seized, but since then the market has exploded, so we could say it is worth two to three times that amount today,” Sophie Hocquerelle, communications manager for French customs, told France 2 television.

She described the find as “an exceptional discovery”.

Tarbosaurus baatar, which roamed Asia during the late Cretaceous period before vanishing 65 million years ago, has never been found outside the continent, making the fossil’s recovery particularly significant for Mongolia.

The country has spent years trying to reclaim fossils that vanished from the Gobi Desert—a region long targeted by both palaeontologists and smugglers since explorer Roy Chapman Andrews unearthed dinosaur eggs there a century ago.

Under Mongolian law, fossils cannot be exported without explicit authorization and are typically returned when seized abroad.

In 2021, the world’s largest triceratops skeleton ever unearthed at eight metres long was sold at auction in Paris for a gargantuan €6.6 million.