Welcome to Aaron Benky's Cabinet of Curiosity is a production of I Heart Radio and Grim and Mild. Our world is full of the unexplainable, and if history is an open book, all of these amazing tales are right there on display, just waiting for us to explore. Welcome to the Cabinet of Curiosities. When we think of paleontology, we think of dusty faced scientists crouching over a gaping hole in the dirt. We think of sunlight gently illuminating a creature that has not been seen in millions of years.
What we don't think about is crime. Real science is not like the movies. You don't find any clone dinosaurs wreaking havoc across an island theme park in our day. But that doesn't mean an area like paleont apology is free from controversy. Eric Procopy should know. He was one of the field's most controversial figures to date. He started collecting fossils and animal remains from a young age, diving for shark teeth in Florida when he was only ten
years old. His parents, however, quickly grew tired of his hobby for one thing. They were running out of room to store it all. They told him that if he wanted to keep anything, he had to start unloading some of his collection. Procopy turned to auction houses and the Internet, where he would sell fossils to the highest bidder. Then he would funnel that money into acquiring and re selling
bigger and better items. By two thousand twelve, Procopy had graduated from shark teeth all the way up to dinosaur skeletons. One such item had come into the fossil hunter's hands, and he was looking for a buyer. It was a skeleton belonging to the Tyrannosaurus batar, a relative of the Tyrannosaurus rex that had lived in Mongolia millions of years ago.
It was a part of the world that had been a hotbed of paleontological activity since famous scientist Roy Chabin Andrews first discovered fossils in the region during the nineteen twenties. Procopy brought the skeleton from Mongolia into Great Britain before having its shipped to the United States. However, he declared it on US customs forms as having originated in the
United Kingdom, not Mongolia. Once it landed in America, it didn't take long for a buyer to emerge, and Procopy set up a sail for the dinosaur's bones in New York. It seemed everything was going fine until Mongolian officials got the word of the impending sail. They stepped in and filed the restraining order, putting a halt to the transaction. According to their records, Procopy had not come to the possession of the Tyrannosaurus skeleton legally. It had been stolen.
The constitution of Mongolia stated that any dinosaur fossil found within the country's borders were automatically deemed culturally significant and must be authorized by removal by the governments. Procopy had never sought government approval. Instead, he had just smuggled the skeleton, not of the entreat with the goal of a major payout.
Dr Bolarmngin, a Mongolian paleontologist, was the person who had recognized the skeleton as having belonged to her home country and not to the United Kingdom as had been previously stated. Procopy claimed that it was impossible to know where the specimen had come from exactly, as the same species of dinosaur had also been discovered in China. His protests didn't matter in the end, though, and he was arrested in October of two thousand twelve for smuggling the Trantosaurus patar skeleton,
as well as two others without prior authorization. Procopy was known to have an eclectic list of clients. These included celebrities and high powered lawyers who paid top dollar for rare fossils, which they would put on display in their homes and businesses. In fact, a Tyrannosaurus batar skull was sold back in two thousand seven to someone who even beat out Leonardo DiCaprio for the privilege of owning it.
Though Procopy was not believed to have participated in the sale, the gallery it was purchased from had bought items from him in the past, and the owner of such a special item it was none other than actor Nicolas Cage, who had started to hit films about a famous treasure hunter. He didn't know the skull was stolen at the time. Homeland Security explained the story behind its provenance, and the actor agreed to relinquish it back to Mongolia where it belonged.
The skull was so much more than a collector's item or a piece of home decor. It had been an important part of Mongolia's past, and like nicholas Cage to America, it was truly a national treasure. Every living thing has a story to tell us. It's life is comprised of joy and sorrow, success and failure. However, the stories don't
end when a thing dies. For one particular creature, there's still quite a lot to say Moby Dick Herman Melville's epic tale of Revenge starts in the city of New Bedford, Massachusetts. The narrator, Ishmael, goes there to join a whaling vessel seeking adventure. From there, he befriends the South Pacific chieftain, who accompanies him on his journey aboard the Pequad, which
is led by the one legged captain Ahab. Melville's novel eventually solidified the author as one of the great American novelists of his day and illustrated New Bedford's importance to the whaling industry of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. However, the Pennsylvania oil rush of eighteen fifty nine put whaling and New Bedford on notice. Petroleum was now a readily available resource and could be used to heat lamps, make candles, and do everything that whale oil had been doing for
hundreds of years. The city pivoted to other industries to stay alive, including manufacturing and fishing, but whaling would still remain an important part of its history, So important, in fact, that in nineteen o three a journalist named Ellis L. Howland proposed a museum to be built to preserve the remains of New Bedford's past. Oil Magnate Henry Huddleson Rodgers agreed, and three years later he donated a bank building for
such a purpose. In nineteen oh seven, the New Bedford Whaling Museum opened to the public, and over the next two decades it would grow in both size and number of exhibits on display. Tourists from all over came to visit, especially in nineteen thirty six, when the first of five complete whale skeletons made their debut. They called it Quasimodo, a fitting name for a humpback whale that had died
in nineteen thirty two. As time passed and the museum continued to increase its offerings, more skeletons found their way to New Bedford, including a thirty year old sperm whale measuring forty eight feet long, and a forty nine foot whale named Raina, as well as her unborn baby, and the biggest skeleton of the bunch, Cobo. Cobo, or King of the Blue Ocean, was a sixty six ft long blue whale that had been struck by a tanker in Blue whales were already endangered when the accident occurred, with
roughly five hundreds still living in the North Atlantic. After it was struck and killed, the whales carcass was studied by various research facilities, with pieces of it being sent all over the globe for examination. As part of Cobo's necropsy, it was discovered that he had been involved in another accident, one that had broken his jaw and left a deep gash in the bone. The skeleton that remained was given to the new Bedford Whaling Museum, which carried out a
thorough cleaning process to get it ready for display. Experts separated it and placed the various bone pieces into twenty two separate cages. These cages were then submerged into the harbor to let fish and other creatures nibble away at the remaining flesh. Saving Museum volunteers from the hassle. The cages were then removed from the water five months later, and the skeleton was brought to the museum's courtyard to
lay under the cleansing light of the sun. It took a while, but the bones eventually dried out, and Museum of Ashal started assembling the skeleton for display. Unfortunately, they had another problem on their hands, whale oil. Whales had been harvested all those years ago for a reason. They produced a lot of oil, and Cobo was no exception. His bones were so coated in oil they had yellowed
and started to smell. To counteract the oil's effects, the skeleton was treated with the solution normally used to cure leather, and it worked. The bones lost both their yellow color and their odor, and were soon hung in the museum's lobby. Cobo now greeted visitors from high above the front doors, but people are worn to keep an eye out because although he's been dead for the last twenty years and is now nothing but a skeleton, Cobo's remains still produce oil,
which drips from his bones onto a platform below. Seeing the educational value in the oil, the museum gathers it into a Beaker to teach people about whale oil and its many properties, while Cobo just sort of hangs around. I hope you've enjoyed today's guided tour of the Cabinet of Curiosities. Subscribe for free on Apple Podcasts, or learn more about the show by visiting Curiosities podcast dot com. The show was created by me Aaron Manky in partnership
with how Stuff Works. I make another award winning show called Lore, which is a podcast, book series, and television show, and you can learn all about it over at the World of Lore dot com. And until next time, stay curious. Yeah,