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US Paleontologists Call For a Worldwide Halt To the Sale of Vertebrate Dinosaur Fossils (theguardian.com)
Leading US paleontologists are calling for a worldwide halt to the sale of vertebrate dinosaur fossils. The booming market for specimens, driven by their popularity with wealthy private collectors, including Hollywood stars, is pushing up prices and putting them out of reach of museums and scientists, they say. From a report: While the art market is organized around brand-name artists, dinosaur sales are all about celebrity species, with a tyrannosaurus rex skeleton fetching up to $10m, although the velociraptor is the most prized. The price tag for a triceratops's skull is $170,000 to $400,000, and a diplodocus is $570,000 to $1.1m. Last year a complete egg of an aepyornis maximus, otherwise known as an elephant bird, sold for $130,000 -- roughly five times what it would have gone for a decade earlier.
Last year the US Society of Vertebrate Palaeontology (SVP) called on the Parisian auction house Aguttes to cancel a sale inside the Eiffel tower that contained just one lot: a 29-foot-long dinosaur of a yet-to-be identified species. The winning bidder paid $2.3m for the piece. Executive members of the society drew attention to the claim that the winning bidder could name the species, calling that assertion "misleading because the naming of new species is governed by the rules of the International Code of Nomenclature." "The sale of all fossils is inappropriate," says Catherine Badgley, former president of the SVP, which represents more than 2,200 international palaeontologists. "Many, particularly vertebrate fossils, are rarely common, and it's certainly not the case for dinosaurs. The commodification is in principle inappropriate because it motivates unscrupulous people."
Last year the US Society of Vertebrate Palaeontology (SVP) called on the Parisian auction house Aguttes to cancel a sale inside the Eiffel tower that contained just one lot: a 29-foot-long dinosaur of a yet-to-be identified species. The winning bidder paid $2.3m for the piece. Executive members of the society drew attention to the claim that the winning bidder could name the species, calling that assertion "misleading because the naming of new species is governed by the rules of the International Code of Nomenclature." "The sale of all fossils is inappropriate," says Catherine Badgley, former president of the SVP, which represents more than 2,200 international palaeontologists. "Many, particularly vertebrate fossils, are rarely common, and it's certainly not the case for dinosaurs. The commodification is in principle inappropriate because it motivates unscrupulous people."
If Paleontologists cannot even govern members of their own profession, what hope do they have convincing a far larger audience to stop selling and buying dinosaur bones? How many non-Paleontologists are finding and extracting dinosaur bones for private sale?
-- All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. -- Edmund Burke
I just want the gemified/agatized bone. That shit is awesome looking when cut and polished.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
This. Over 99% of all fossils are piled in boxes in storage rooms at universities and museums. Be nice if there was a way for scientists and collectors to coexist peacefully. Hoarding a cool skeleton in a mansion somewhere is less valuable than a museum display, but hiding it in boxes in a warehouse only accessible to one or two departments isn't much better.
Never mind that many of these fossils sit in the archives of a museum lost and forgotten for years.
If they're sitting there, then they can be dug up (so to speak) later and research done on them. If they're in private collections, this is much harder, and they're more likely to be destroyed or damaged.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Fantasy. Rich people want to own rare items for themselves, not on display. Private digs prevent proper time for study, identification and even proper removal practices. Worse, without the context of the nearby rocks, revelant knowledge about the ecosystem is made impossible.
I doubt museums are primarily interested in these fossils for display; they want them for research purposes. If there was more collaboration then perhaps more paleontologists would be informed early enough in the dig process to gather the relevant information from the dig site. Or be involved in the dig in the first place.
-- All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. -- Edmund Burke
i.e. Require allowing access by paleontologists at their expense provided that they work with reasonable speed (don't slow walk the process deliberately, or starve it for workers). The trade off being the paleontologists do the extraction promptly in exchange for study access. Once the fossils have been studied their scientific value has been extracted. (presumably important examples would be 3d scanned so the originals aren't needed for future comparisons) Time limit the process so that the private owners aren't unduly deprived of the fossils. That way the private owner gets free quality preparation of the fossils in exchange for a reasonable delay so that there isn't incentive to avoid the process.
is particularly ironic. Paleontologists are themselves pretty unscrupulous people.
I found it fascinating to learn that there are more, nearly an order of magnitude more, un-processed vertebrate fossils sitting wrapped in plaster and straw in wooden crates than there are cleaned and in the hands of collectors and museums.
Instead of choking the trade in these and driving it underground wouldn't it make more sense to work on the supply side issues?
No disrespect, but paleontologists are cheap. $200k for a skull will pay for a whole lot of science.
About 20 million artifacts were destroyed just this past September when the National Museum of Brazil went up in flames. I expect even more have been decimated in the museums and historical displays targeted by ISIS. Unless it's a nuclear bunker, collecting everything you want to save in a single spot is not necessarily a great idea for preserving it all. Not to mention that, in general, museums have to deal with a lot of theft and vandalism. Many hugely significant artifacts have simply disappeared. Maybe just because of bad bookkeeping, maybe something more nefarious.
Packing artifacts in creates might be better than handing them out as souvenirs to passing tourists, but I don't think it's better than letting people who can afford state-of-the-art security and fire suppressant systems make them their prized possessions. The real risk to these artifacts is being insufficiently valued by society in general. That's when they will be disposed, put in insufficiently safe storage (government funded or not), or even ground up to make "medicine." Historical artifacts selling for millions may not match with the socially enlightened future imagined by Star Trek, but it's an awful lot better than many more likely alternatives.
When things get complex, multiply by the complex conjugate.