A Virginia fossils dealer was sentenced Tuesday to three months in jail even after a prosecutor described his cooperation with law enforcement in heroic terms, saying he enabled more than 18 largely complete dinosaur fossils to be located, enough for Mongolia to open its first dinosaur museum.
Eric Prokopi, 39, was sentenced by Southern District Judge Alvin Hellerstein (See Profile) for smuggling a 70-million-year-old Tyrannosaurus skeleton from Mongolia into the United States by making false statements to U.S. officials, including that the then-unassembled bones were merely reptile fossils from Great Britain.
