Nicolas Cage Is Secretly A Dinosaur Bone Collector
In 2007, Nicolas Cage and Leonardo DiCaprio got into a bidding war at a Beverly Hills gallery over a 67-million-year-old Tyrannosaurus bataar skull, a close relative of the T. rex that roamed what is now Mongolia's Gobi Desert. Cage won. He paid $276,000, received a certificate of authenticity, took the skull home, and added it to his collection of prehistoric bones. Then in 2014, the Department of Homeland Security called. Federal investigators had been dismantling an international fossil trafficking ring run by a Florida dealer named Eric Prokopi, who had spent years smuggling dinosaur bones out of Mongolia using forged customs documents. The Tarbosaurus skull in Cage's living room had been traced back to Prokopi's network. Cage cooperated fully, handed it over voluntarily, and in 2015 it was returned to the Mongolian government. He received nothing back for his $276,000. DiCaprio, who lost the original auction, ended up $276,000 richer and zero federal investigations later.
The skull story is the most famous chapter, but it is not the whole book. Cage is a lifelong collector of extraordinary and unusual objects like shrunken heads, comic books, castles in Germany and the Bahamas, a pet octopus, and an extensive collection of prehistoric fossils. He has described his purchasing style as "Nouveau Shamanic," choosing objects based on their energetic and symbolic power rather than conventional taste. He sold two of his castles during a tax crisis and lost other properties, but the collecting instinct has never left him. The National Treasure movies, in which Cage plays a man obsessed with hunting rare historical artifacts, were not a stretch. "I've always been fascinated with the idea of discovering something lost," he once said. He meant it literally.
