The US government seized a rare dinosaur skeleton on Friday in what an expert called an important step toward returning the bones to their home in Mongolia.

Dallas-based Heritage Auctions sold off the nearly complete Tyrannosaurus bataar in New York on May 20, when an unnamed buyer submitted a winning bid of $1,052,500.

The seizure was ordered by a federal judge in Manhattan earlier this week, and on Friday wooden crates holding pieces of the fossil were loaded onto a truck at a Queens storage center and driven away to a facility whose location was not disclosed.

"We are one step closer to bringing this rare Tyrannosaurus bataar skeleton back home to the people of Mongolia," Mongolian President Elbegdorj Tsakhia said in a written statement handed out by his Houston lawyer, Robert Painter, who took photographs of the seizure through a chain-link fence outside the Cadogan Tate Fine Art property where it had been stored.

"Today we send a message to looters all over the world: We will not turn a blind eye to the marketplace of looted fossils."

Bolortsetseg Minjin, director of the Institute for the Study of Mongolian Dinosaurs, took pictures of the exchange as well, saying: "It's a very exciting event. It's just unbelievable. I never expected it would be this fast."

The United States had requested the seizure in a lawsuit, saying the relics had been brought into the country with documents that disguised the potentially valuable dinosaur skeleton that originated in Mongolia as reptile bones from Britain.

Eric Prokopi, 37, of Gainesville, Florida, defended his handling of the skeleton in a written statement on Thursday, saying that he was not an international smuggler and that he had worked since bringing the bones into the country in March 2010 to turn chunks of rocks and broken bones "into an impressive skeleton" that he came to call "Ty".

"I can wholeheartedly say the import documents are not fraudulent, a truth I am confident will be brought to light in the coming weeks," he said. "The value was declared much lower than the auction value because, quite simply, it was loose, mostly broken bones and rocks with embedded bones. It was not what you see today, a virtually complete, mounted skeleton."

The bones were valued on import documents at only $15,000, but the skeleton Prokopi put together sold at auction last month for $1.052 million, contingent on the outcome of litigation involving the dinosaur.

Although the buyer has not been disclosed, Painter said he had been told that a New York private gallery owner had made the winning bid.

The Tyrannosaurus Bataar was a dinosaur from the late Cretaceous period, about 70 million years ago, the government said in its lawsuit. It was first discovered in 1946 during a joint Soviet-Mongolian expedition to the Gobi Desert.

Mongolia has enacted laws since 1924 declaring dinosaur fossils to be the property of the government of Mongolia and criminalizing their export from the country.

The Associated Press