Nicolas Cage says he is still waiting on £186k refund after returning stolen dinosaur skull

Nicolas Cage has confessed he has been left out of pocket over a stolen dinosaur skull he bought at auction and was then asked to return to Mongolia.

The Hollywood actor, 58, outbid Leonardo DiCaprio to become the brief new owner of the Tyrannosaurus bataar skull after paying $276,000 (£186,000) to a gallery in Beverly Hills in 2007.

He was unaware at the time that the artifact had been stolen and was the rightful property of the Mongolian government.

Appearing on the cover of the April issue of GQ magazine, he told the publication how he has yet to receive a penny of his refund.

“It was the skull I bought at an action, and I bought it legally,” he explained. “Here’s the MacGuffin: When the Mongolian government said they needed it back, I gave it to them, but I never got my money back.”

Adding: “So, somebody at the auction house should be in jail.”

The Con Air star’s publicist Alex Schack said at the time that Cage had received a certificate of authenticity from the gallery for the skull, but was later informed by the Department of Homeland Security in 2014 that it might have been acquired illegally.

Elsewhere in the interview, Cage opened up about his marriage to Riko Shibata, declaring that his fifth marriage “is it” for him.

Cage and Japanese native Shibata, 27, tied the knot in February 2021 and are expecting a child.

He was previously married to Patricia Arquette from 1995 to 2001, Lisa Marie Presley for three months in 2002, Alice Kim from 2004 to 2016, and Erika Koike from March 2019 to June 2019.

He is already a father to sons Weston, 31, and Kal-El, 16, and told how he and Shibata plan to name their child Akira Francesco if it is a boy and Lennon Augie if it is a girl.

“Augie” was his late father’s nickname, while “Francesco” is a nod to his director uncle Francis Ford Coppola, who he says “has decided to change his name to Francesco”.