Denver museum to return looted relics to Cambodia after the U.S. moves to seize them

Decades after they were hacked from temples and other historical sites, four ancient statues from the Denver Museum of Art are finally heading home.

The museum has agreed to turn over the relics to the U.S. government, which plans to return them to their native Cambodia, according to a forfeiture complaint filed Monday in the Southern District of New York’s federal court.

The items include a likeness of the goddess of transcendent wisdom called the Prajnaparamita and another of the sun god Surya

The repatriation announcement comes amid mounting pressure by U.S. and Cambodian authorities on prominent art institutions to reexamine their collections of Khmer art, especially pieces acquired over decades of unrest in the country when looters stole vast numbers of culturally significant antiquities.

And it closely follows an investigation by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists and The Washington Post, which reported last month that 10 museums—among them the Denver Art Museum—hold 43 relics in their collections linked to a notorious indicted art dealer, Douglas Latchford.

“I am delighted by the upcoming return of these four highly significant cultural objects to Cambodia,” said Phoeurng Sackona, the Cambodian Minister of Culture and Fine Arts. “Each one has a fascinating story and priceless value to our nation.”

In recent years, the Cambodian government has launched a vigorous effort to gather information on hundreds of valuable cultural artefacts the country says were stolen.

Many of these pieces now reside in the U.S., Western Europe and Australia.

Federal authorities said that the four pieces in Denver were identified as stolen by the former leader of a major Cambodian looting team that removed ancient artefacts when the country was governed by the genocidal Khmer Rouge regime in the 1970s.

The museum acquired the relics from Latchford between 2000 and 2005, according to the forfeiture filing.

Latchford was indicted in 2019 for allegedly looting Cambodia’s cultural heritage on a grand scale. The case against Latchford was dropped last year after he died.

Over his decades of trading antiquities, Latchford amassed one of the world’s largest private collections of Khmer treasures, mostly Hindu and Buddhist sculptures.

Why this 300 million-year-old fossil discovered in Utah has the palaeontology world buzzing

A 300-million-year-old fossil discovered deep in Canyonlands National Park in Utah could belong to an entirely new species, reports Amy Joi O’Donoghue for the Deseret News.

The fossilized critter is an amniote—a land-dwelling vertebrate that lays eggs— and has four legs. It’s most likely an ancient ancestor of reptiles or mammals, though more testing is needed before scientists can definitively label it as a new species, reports Sherry Liang for CNN.

“It’s roughly the size of an iguana and (the fossil) preserves at least the vertebrae, top of the skull, and some of the shoulder girdle and forelimb,” Adam Marsh, the lead palaeontologist at Petrified Forest National Park, tells Mark Price for the Sacramento Bee.

Around a year ago, a Canyonlands park ranger stumbled across the fossil and reported it to the park. Then, scientists from the Natural History Museum of Utah, Petrified Forest National Park and the University of Southern California teamed up to dig into this discovery.

They filed for a research permit and excavated the fossil last month, reports CNN.

“This is cool because it’s 50 million years older than the oldest dinosaur fossil,” Marsh tells the Deseret. “So it’s kind of cool that it’s from a period in Earth’s history where we just don’t have a lot of fossils from in North America especially.”

This creature existed between the Pennsylvanian Period (323.2 to 298.9 million years ago) and the Permian (298.9 to 251.9 million years ago).

During the Pennsylvanian era, plants started to colonize dry land by way of more evolved seeds; animals did so through the evolution of the amniotic egg, in which the embryo develops inside a shell, like with birds and reptiles.

In the Permian, the planet’s continents started to squish together to form the supercontinent Pangea, and the era ended with the largest mass extinction in Earth’s history.

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“It’s a phenomenal specimen. You do not see something like that very often, so it’s really significant for that in itself,” Marsh tells CNN. “But what it indicates is that there’s probably more fossils out there, especially at Canyonlands, in this really important time interval.”

Adding to the excitement, Adam Huttenlocker, a biologist at the University of Southern California, tells CNN that finding fossils of aquatic creatures is common at Canyonlands, but this is the first time he’s heard of the discovery of a land-dwelling vertebrate in the park.

“It really goes to show what kind of fossil resources are hidden in our national parks waiting to be discovered and shared with the public,” Marsh tells the Sacramento Bee.