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Business Daily: Trading Ancient Bones

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15/08/2018 GMT

Trading Ancient Bones

BBC World Service - Business Daily, Trading Ancient Bones

The business of trading dinosaur bones and woolly mammoth ivory.

Mongolia is a gold-mine for palaeontologists, where thousands of dinosaur skeletons have been unearthed in the Gobi desert. But many of these skeletons have been smuggled out of the country to be sold at auction abroad as trophies for the super rich. Joshua Thorpe reports on how this adversely impacts on the work of palaeontologists and what is being done to repatriate these dinosaur skeletons back to Mongolia.

The trade in ivory from woolly mammoths dug up in Siberia is worth billions of dollars and is currently legal. So should it be banned? Iris Ho, senior specialist for Wildlife programmes and policy at the Humane Society in Washington DC, explains how the legality of the mammoth ivory trade enables traders in China to sell banned elephant ivory as mammoth; and Douglas Macmillan, professor of bio diversity at the University of Kent, gives his view on whether a ban on mammoth ivory would be effective.

(Image: the skull of a Tyrannosaurus Rex. Credit: Getty Images)

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