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Prehistory's Brilliant Future
An anonymous reader writes Senior Vice President and Provost of Science at the American Museum of Natural History Michael J. Novacek has written an op-ed piece about the glut of new dinosaurs recently discovered, including a fish fossil with flexible limbs which documents the transition from life in the water to life on land. In addition to the new species, a team has recently published its work on new skeletal remains of Spinosaurus, a 100-million-year-old carnivore. From the article: "As with any frontier of new knowledge, there are challenges as well as opportunities. Certain regions of the world, like North Africa, may hold the key to understanding the evolution of major groups, but remain poorly explored. Even as some regions become accessible thanks to political change, others can turn into conflict zones. Illegal fossil poaching is rampant in many areas and needs to be controlled before it does untold damage to our future knowledge. It is all the more important to deal with these challenges when we consider the unique contribution of paleontological evidence to human knowledge. From our study of living species, we could not have been predicted the existence of dragonflies as big as sea gulls or dinosaurs with the bulk of large whales that could support themselves on land. Such discoveries provide insights about the capacity of organisms to evolve, adapt and survive."
Most countries have strict regulations on what can be pulled out of the ground - this is primarily to govern the mining / oil & gas industries.
Because palaeontological and archaeological finds come under a similar "shite pulled outta the ground" ruling, yes, there's concessions and regulations governing fossil finds, including a licence to do so. For someone who just wants to walk for a few days looking for fossils, I believe it's the same as an amateur gold prospecting licence.
That's how it works here in Western Australia, anyway. YMMV.
The ever-whining ACs suck just as hard. The complaints never end.
Make your own blog. Linking to some stories is really not that hard... and if you are gonna ruin the only feature of Slashdot (the comments), then you might as well just quit it altogether.