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Dinosaur Auction In Las Vegas
Xerfas writes "If you ever dreamed of owning your own dinosaur, here's your chance. Possibly the most impressive natural history auction ever is set to take place Oct. 3 at the Venetian Casino in Las Vegas. Here you can find everything from the T.rex to a duck-billed dinosaur and a mammoth skeleton."
From TFA:
Fifty-one million years after the dinosaurs became extinct, Carcharocles megalodon trolled the Earthâ(TM)s seas as an apex predator
Great, as if trolls on Slashdot weren't enough...
This comes down to a fundamental question of who owns fossils, or any natural resources for that matter. I just wonder if 50 or 100 years from now, after someone has long paid for these at auction, that society/courts/prior landowners/native peoples/you-name-an-interest-group will sue for the return of these "stolen" artifacts.
We see this happen with art and antiquities all the time. Those things taken from their original home, either in time of war or time of peace are destined to be fought over years later. So how long will it be before society changes and it seems reasonable that one interest group gets enough support and whomever purchases the fossils will be forced to give them back, perhaps even without getting their money back.
This post brought to you by your friendly neighborhood MBA.
Other than the TRex, the prices were not all that bad. Sure, out of my price range. But $500k for a triceratops (I know its something else) seems pretty good.
Wake me up when I can buy a prehistoric shark with a frikkin' slingshot.
Finally had enough. Come see us over at https://soylentnews.org/
This comes down to a fundamental question of who owns fossils, or any natural resources for that matter. I just wonder if 50 or 100 years from now, after someone has long paid for these at auction, that society/courts/prior landowners/native peoples/you-name-an-interest-group will sue for the return of these "stolen" artifacts.
We see this happen with art and antiquities all the time. Those things taken from their original home, either in time of war or time of peace are destined to be fought over years later. So how long will it be before society changes and it seems reasonable that one interest group gets enough support and whomever purchases the fossils will be forced to give them back, perhaps even without getting their money back.
In the United States, fossils are owned by the person/entity/organization/government that owns the land they are found on. If you read each of the descriptions they tell you where the fossils were dug up. That makes a lot of paleontologists mad but that's the way it is. Read this article:
In the United States and many other countries, fossil specimens collected on private land become the property of the landowner. Trade in these fossils is entirely legal. While many academics and institutions oppose fossil trade in any form, others take a different stance.
Now, I think I remember reading of cases where fossils were found in places like Yosemite and illegally excavated and sold illegally but that's because the state park owned them.
Your analogy of ill-gotten wartime loot is kind of funny. When the descendants of dinosaurs come looking for their ancestors bones, we will have to cough them up.
My work here is dung.
Assertions that these "dinosaur" "fossils" are really the bones of early species are just a con. The Universe was created approximately 6000 years ago and these so-called fossils were placed in the earth by God to test our faith. He's trying to find out if we can be tricked into using those tools of Satan, logic and evidence.
Good Creationists could call the Las Vegas police and have this auction of fraudulent material shut down for making false claims about the age of the items for sale.
I piss off bigots.
You need to read each item description.
An auction house is running it, and as far as I can tell, each item comes from somewhere different - the T. Rex is from Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh, the Shark Jaws from Vito Bertucci, etc.
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
Thats nothing, sometimes you can just ask for a +5 mod.
How about it mods? +5 informative?
--Maquis196
They come from different places. The description of the duck bill dinosaur (hadrosaur) says it had been owned by a Japanese museum which closed, and was then bought by a private American collector who is now selling it.
There's another article here about the auction which mentions the T.Rex also currently being privately owned:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/32705922/ns/technology_and_science-science/
Sign of the recession I guess that some fat cat has to sell his T.Rex.
"And then, of course, you have those who say that the "creation in six days" is not to be taken literally. "
If you can get your friendly neighborhood creationist to allow for this, that's the compromise I can usually live with for conversation. Replacing "day" which we are now pretty fierce calling 24 hours with "day" from "In *MY* day we didn't have lawns, we had to assemble the biocarbon molecules for each blade of grass by hand", then "life in six eras (days)" is fine.
Life IS pretty neat, so sometimes it is pretty comfy to think of a Deist force that guided life that doesn't "talk personally" to people. Most of where ultra-orthodox religion gets stuck is in superlatives of God as Perfect. Replace that with "Pretty Blessed Good" and all the arguments melt away. ("Gee, we're not sure what $Deity was thinking when ___ allowed Down's Syndrome to happen, but ___ is still Blessed Good so I'll worship ____ anyway."
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
From Wikipedia
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
You can also ask for this: MOD PARENT DOWN!