The Black Market for Dinosaurs

On the morning of October 17, 2012, a cadre of federal agents and sheriff’s deputies in Gainesville, Florida, went to the home of a suspected fossil smuggler named Eric Prokopi and arrested him. As I reported in The New Yorker in January, 2013, the case against Prokopi was unusual and aggressive: it included several counts of felonious smuggling, and characterizations of the defendant as a “one-man black market.” Two months after his arrest, Prokopi pleaded guilty to smuggling the bones of...