Brazil wins legal battle for 100 million-year-old fossil bounty

A legal battle that has lasted for years on a treasure trove of fossil dinosaurs and other animals 100 million years old from the Brazilian Araripe basin is coming to an end.

Forty-five fossils valued at 600,000 euros (about 2.5 million Brazilian Reais, or 680,000 US dollars) will be repatriated after a judge of the Supreme Court of Lyon, France, decided May 13 that the specimens had been illegally removed from Brazil. Later this month, the same court will decide the fate of a 46th fossil – the almost complete skeleton of a flying reptile called pterosaur (Anhanguera Santanae), whose wingspan is nearly 4 meters.

Brazilian paleontologists praised the French court's ruling as the biggest victory so far in their country's efforts to end the illegal trade in fossils and recover cultural treasures.

The decision "is a victory for Brazilian science," says Mírian Pacheco, a paleobiologist at the Federal University of São Carlos. She says that the study of fossils should help researchers better understand the biology of these ancient animals and their environment, including the factors that led them to extinction.

The legal action is the culmination of an investigation that the Brazilian and French authorities opened five years ago, after the French company Geofossiles put the pterosaur for sale on the auction site. eBay auctions. "This is the first time this amount of fossils will be repatriated to Brazil after the decision of a foreign court," said Rafael Rayol, the government prosecutor who led the investigation into fossils in Brazil.

A spokesman for Geofossiles said that he had agreed to sell the pterosaur after Eldonia, a Gannat company in France, which owned the 46 fossils, "assured us that the specimen was legal". Geofossiles, which is not a party to the legal proceedings, would not have organized the auction if it had known that Brazilian law prohibited the sale of fossils, said the spokesman of the company.

Eldonia's lawyers told Nature that the company was not aware of the decision of the French court and that "if such a decision were taken by the judge, we would fight against it and win". They denied that Eldonia did something illegal and claimed that the sale of fossils was legal under European law. The company's lawyers did not say whether Eldonia had given assurances to Geofossiles.

The Araripe Basin, northeast of Brazil, where the fossils originate, is located on the border of the states of Ceará, Piauí and Pernambuco. The area is famous among paleontologists for its vast selection of well preserved prehistoric fossils. Many of them date back to the Cretaceous, 145 to 66 million years ago, and ended in the disappearance of the dinosaurs.

The Brazilian authorities suspect that the fossils at the center of the trial – all rare, well preserved and of great scientific value – were removed from the country in the 1980s and 1990s, but did not specify who could have done so. "We are talking about the remains of sea turtles, fish, reptiles, arachnids, insects and plants dating back millions of years," said Taissa Rodrigues, a biologist at the University of California. 39, Federal University of Espírito Santo de Vitória, which informed the Brazilian authorities about fossils. .

Go once, go twice …

In 2014, a group of paleontologists on Facebook warned Rodrigues, who studies pterosaurs, that one of the most important A. Santanae Fossils never found in Brazil have been auctioned online. Geofossiles, a store in Charleville-Mezieres, France, was asking for a million reais for the pterosaur.

Rodrigues was struck by the fact that the pterosaur skeleton was almost complete and that his head, neck and wings were intact. "Usually we only find isolated bones," she says. But she was also surprised to see the specimen for sale because all the fossils in Brazil belong to the government, whether they are on public or private land. "They are the property of the state under the law and can not be removed or sold, even by Brazilian citizens," said Rodrigues. Penalties incurred without the government's authorization include fines and imprisonment.

Rodrigues contacted the Brazilian prosecutor, who opened an investigation into the auction of fossil fuels and sought legal aid from the French authorities. They quickly found the owner of the fossils, Eldonia, who runs a fossil restoration and reproduction facility.

Rayol says that the 45 fossils affected by the French court's decision will be returned to Brazil this year. The Brazilian authorities have already requested permission to inspect the fossils in France as they develop a plan to ship them to a museum run by Cariri Regional University, in Ceará, at Brazil, he said. Rayol expects the French court to order Brazil's return to Brazil from the 46th fossil pterosaur at the end of the next trial.

The results of the French fossil record will help the Brazilian authorities to establish protocols for the repatriation of fossils in the future, said André Strauss, archaeologist at the Museum of Archeology and Ethnology at the University of São Paulo. "It also has an institutional value," he says, reinforcing Brazilian law and saying "the country will no longer tolerate this type of colonialist practice" of exporting fossils without permission.

Meanwhile, Pacheco is working to educate its Brazilian compatriots about fossil trafficking. "In Angatuba, in the São Paulo countryside, where I've been working for some time, people were selling fossils as souvenirs or keeping them in their properties, not knowing it was a crime," she says. "In order to change such behavior, I encouraged heritage education activities for people living near paleontological sites to monitor suspicious activity.