Nicolas Cage Returns $276,000 T-Rex Skull: The Story Behind the Fossil Debacle!

The saga began in March 2007 when Nicolas Cage bought a dinosaur skull, specifically from a Tyrannosaurus bataar, from the I.M. Chait Gallery in Beverly Hills for $267,000. He reportedly outbid his fellow actor Leonardo DiCaprio for the fossil.

However, eight years later, in 2015, the office of Preet Bharara, a federal prosecutor in Manhattan, filed a civil forfeiture complaint to seize the skull which was alleged to have been stolen. The complaint didn’t name Cage as the owner, but his press agent, Alex Schack, confirmed that the actor had indeed purchased the skull.

During the investigation, Alex Schack also stated that his client had received a certificate of authenticity from the gallery and had first been contacted by U.S. authorities in July 2014, when the Department of Homeland Security informed him that the skull might have been stolen. After investigators confirmed that a theft had indeed occurred in Mongolia, Nicolas Cage agreed to return it immediately so it could be repatriated to the Mongolian government, and thus he was not charged with any wrongdoing.

As for the gallery, which was not pursued legally either, it had previously purchased and sold a smuggled dinosaur skeleton to the convicted paleontologist Eric Prokopi. However, it remains unclear if the skull owned by Nicolas Cage was directly linked to Prokopi, who pleaded guilty in December 2012 to smuggling a Tyrannosaurus bataar skeleton from the Gobi Desert in Mongolia and was later sentenced to three months in prison.

The Tyrannosaurus bataar, like its more famous cousin, the Tyrannosaurus rex, was a carnivore that lived about 70 million years ago. Its remains have only been found in Mongolia, a country that criminalized the export of dinosaur fossils in 1924.

The specimen was returned to the Republic of Mongolia during a repatriation ceremony in May 2013.

Nicolas Cage, Avid Collector and Squandered Fortune

According to CNBC, Nicolas Cage had spent $150 million on various artifacts throughout his career, including the aforementioned dinosaur skull, shrunken pygmy heads, and two European castles.

The actor was once among the highest earners in Hollywood with an estimated net worth of about $150 million, a fortune he did not maintain for long, spending it on a series of costly purchases.

At one point, Cage owned 15 residences worldwide, including homes in California and Las Vegas, as well as a private island in the Bahamas. He also acquired a collection of unusual items, including a nine-foot-tall burial tomb, an octopus, shrunken pygmy heads, a Superman comic book worth $150,000, and the infamous dinosaur skull he had to return.

His “Quest for the Holy Grail”

But it wasn’t these eccentric items that truly sent Nicolas Cage into financial peril, but rather his overextended real estate portfolio. “What’s an octopus, 80 bucks? You’re not going to go into financial ruin over an octopus,” he told The New York Times in a 2019 interview.

The actor went through a phase where he was “meditating three times a day and reading books on philosophy” and began to seek out locations he had studied and read about: “I got into mythology, and I was finding properties that aligned with that,” he explained.

This “quest for the Holy Grail,” as Cage called it, “led him to explore different areas, primarily in England, but also in the United States.” Throughout his journey, he accumulated real estate, including two European castles purchased for $10 million and $2.3 million, respectively, and a country estate in Newport, Rhode Island, for $15.7 million.

He likened this journey to building a personal library: “You read a book, there’s a reference to another book, then you buy that book, and you add on those references. For me, the question was: Where was the Grail? Was it here? Was it there?”

His ultimate conclusion: “What is the Grail, if not the Earth itself?”

Despite his financial ruin, Nicolas Cage admitted he did not regret all his purchases: “There are good and bad investments. The good investments came from my personal interest and my genuine appreciation of history,” he said. This includes “Action Comics No. 1,” the very first comic book featuring Superman, which he bought for $150,000.

He Wanted to Be Like His Uncle, Francis Ford Coppola

For Nicolas Cage, the allure of real estate was also partly rooted in his upbringing. Growing up near Beverly Hills with his professor father, he lived modestly: “I took the bus to school, and some of the older boys went to school in Maseratis and Ferraris,” he recounted to the Times.

Even as a young boy, he aspired for more: “My uncle [Francis Ford Coppola] was very generous. I would visit him in the summer, and those summers, I wanted to be like him. I wanted to have mansions. That was what motivated me.”

Despite these challenges, the actor was also embroiled in tax issues. In 2009, several media outlets reported that he owed over $6 million to the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) for the fiscal year 2007, along with an additional $350,000 in unpaid taxes from 2002 to 2004.

In 2022, he confirmed that he had finally finished paying off his debts and planned to be more selective in his future film roles, having appeared in numerous movies to escape his financial difficulties.

Last year, the actor made headlines for his terrifying performance in the horror film Longlegs by Oz Perkins, available on VOD if you dare.

Check out the film’s trailer below: