Nicolas Cage has said he’s still waiting for his money back after returning a stolen dinosaur skull he’d bought at an auction.

The actor had purchased a Tyrannosaurus bataar skull from a Beverly Hills gallery for $276,000 (£186,000) in 2007, without knowing it was stolen.

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“It was the skull I bought at an auction, and I bought it legally,” Cage recently told GQ. “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.”

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

Cage’s publicist Alex Schack had said at the time that the actor had received a certificate of authenticity from the gallery, but was later informed by the Department of Homeland Security that the skull might have been taken illegally.

Meanwhile, last year Nicolas Cage said he would rather be known as a “thespian” than an “actor”.

“I really don’t like the word actor because for me it always implies, ‘Oh, he’s a great actor, therefore he’s a great liar, and (great at) lying,’” Cage said. “So with the risk of sounding like a pretentious a-hole, I like the word thespian because thespian means you’re going into your heart.”