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Friends of 'Big Al', Montana's most famous dinosaur, want a buddy of the allosaurus to come home to the United States.

Big Al is displayed at the Museum of the Rockies in Bozeman. His buddy, a near-complete skeleton of another allosaurus, was stolen a decade ago from federal land in Utah and sold to a private museum in Japan.

Now Mark Goodwin — a palaeontologist at the University of California, Berkeley, who has helped to repatriate pilfered specimens in the past — has started a drive for the return of the rare dinosaur.

“The US government should seek the return of this skeleton,” argues Goodwin. “If someone stole the Liberty Bell and it ended up in Japan, tell me it wouldn't be returned.” He says that he plans to write to the US state department to argue his case.

The purloined allosaurus is now at the Hayashibara Museum of Natural Sciences in Okayama, which is funded by Hayashibara, a large chemical firm. Museum officials have declined to offer to return the specimen, saying only that they are “ready to discuss the matter” with the US government. Shinobu Ishigaki, the museum's assistant director, adds that US palaeontologists are free to study the skeleton in Japan if they wish.

In July, Barry James, a Pennsylvania fossil dealer, pleaded guilty in a Salt Lake City courtroom to stealing the skeleton in 1992 and selling it to the Japanese museum for $400,000. James was ordered to pay $50,000 restitution and was placed on probation.

Federal authorities say that the Hayashibara Museum was duped into believing that the skeleton was found on private land. But to palaeontologists such as Jack Horner of the Museum of the Rockies, that shouldn't make a difference. Two years ago, for example, his museum returned a fossil skeleton to China, from where it had been improperly exported. “That is what a legitimate institution does,” says Horner.

University of Wyoming palaeontologist Brent Breithaupt, who helped to rescue Big Al from the clutches of a commercial dealer in 1991, believes that diplomacy is the best way to recover the skeleton. “We need to see if we can develop a working relationship with the Japanese to get it back,” he says.