Dear HCN,
The story “Who owns
these bones?” (HCN, 3/4/96) addresses a timely and important issue
prompted by recent introduction in Congress of the “Fossil
Preservation Act” by Reps. Tim Johnson, D-S.D., and Joe Skeen,
R-N.M. The proposed legislation requires
clarification.
Your article states that, under
the new law, “commercial and amateur collectors would be compelled
to hand over all scientifically unique fossils to a federal
land-management agency.” The bill requires only that scientifically
unique specimens that are excavated from an area of greater than
two square meters will be relinquished. The bill leaves unprotected
all fossils that can be picked up from the surface or that can be
excavated from an area of less than two square meters. Truth is,
this includes the overwhelming majority of fossils; only a very,
very few require excavation from greater than two square
meters.
The bill would allow anyone, no matter
what their training, to collect any fossil that is not huge and
unique – no matter what its educational and scientific value – to
own that fossil, and to sell it. I believe that’s just plain wrong;
fossils collected from federal lands, and the information that can
be gleaned from them, belong to everyone.
The
“Fossil Preservation Act” would result in pillaging of fossil
resources in the Western states on an unprecedented scale, turning
important specimens into art objects and curios and, in the
process, destroying their educational and scientific value. The
people who do care about the West (and having been raised in the
West I count myself as one of them) should not allow the fossil
heritage that lies within their rocks to be sold to the highest
bidder.
The issue of training surfaces
repeatedly in your article. It is the source of charges by
commercial fossil dealers in several quotations that academic
paleontologists are elitists (and worse). But why is training
important? The rationale for having trained paleontologists doing
paleontological work is no different than for any trade, whether it
be a plumber, electrician, police officer, or
physician.
From careful excavations and
analyses, paleontologists have been able to infer how fast extinct
creatures could move, what they ate, how they died, what kind of
environment they lived in, aspects of social behavior, and so on.
It is crucially important to know how the fossil was oriented in
the rock, at what level it occurred, what other fossils were
associated with it, and so on. Without the collection of these
kinds of data, fossils become scientifically and educationally
meaningless. Each piece of information collected is like a page in
a book; without the pages, there is no story.
The charges of elitism also miss the mark when one considers what
academic paleontologists do for a living: They are researchers and
educators and, as such, their jobs are to gain and distribute
knowledge about fossils. I do not know of a single academic
paleontologist who does not spend considerable amounts of time
sharing the knowledge he or she has gained, not just with college
students and colleagues, but with local community groups, rockhound
groups and school children. Many colleagues also encourage
participation of non-scientists in excavations. Paleontologists at
museums like the Denver Museum of Natural History have developed
outstanding training programs for amateurs.
The
organization that I represent, the Society of Vertebrate
Paleontology, has a strong outreach program to amateur
paleontologists and counts many of them among its members. If this
constitutes elitism, then we are guilty as
charged.
David
Krause
Stony Brook, New York
The writer is president of the Society of
Vertebrate Paleontology.
This article appeared in the print edition of the magazine with the headline Dem bones are your bones.
Republish our articles for free, online or in print, under a Creative Commons license.
