Fossil Smuggling Ring Exposed in Morocco’s Sahara Desert

It is an illicit but very lucrative trade that allows smugglers to make a fortune, explains France 2. As an example, for a dinosaur skeleton, they sometimes earn tens of thousands of euros.

It is notably at the border between Morocco and Algeria, in the middle of the vast rocky expanses of the Sahara, where dozens of small open-pit mines emerge, that this trade thrives. Here, notes France 2 in its report, men armed with homemade tools relentlessly attack the rock, in search of fossils.

"It’s very difficult, it’s exhausting. On the best days, we earn 4 to 5 euros; but often, we are far from the mark," confides Saïd Achabou, a treasure hunter from the city of Erfoud, said to be rich in fossils. In this city, several merchants have workshops where, once polished, the fossils are sometimes sold for several hundred euros to the many tourists who flock to the city and like to leave with a few souvenirs. However, the big merchants, who mainly profit from this prehistoric trade, operate in secrecy by selling their fossils much more expensively.

The France 2 investigation insists on the laxity of the competent authorities who do not in any way disturb these many illegal merchants, all the more so as their activity sustains the region.