I live by a shop that sells some very impressive fossils. Should I get one?

May 13, 2005 9:13 AM

I live by a shop that sells some very impressive fossils. Should I get one?

I'm midly interested in paleontology; but in any event this place carries some spectacular specimens (in the realm of about a foot in legth or so). From articles and documentaries, I have a fairly appalling image of the business, where apparently private companies compete directly with scientists for the choiciest trophies. As much as I see this as a good chance to get my hands on something intriguing and beautiful, I have so far (for 5 years now) resisted temptation in fear of somehow contributing to an effort against scientific progress. The question is: am I right in being worried?

posted by magullo to science & nature (16 comments total)

I think you've already answered this question yourself. If you find it immoral, then don't. If it doesn't bother you, go for it!

But to specifically answer your question: No, you're not right in being worried. You shouldn't worry. If you want to buy it, and you believe that you can look past the possible immoral practices of the business, then buy it. If not, then don't-- but there's no sense in worrying about it!
posted by nitsuj at 9:29 AM on May 13, 2005

The stuff that's for sale next door is almost certainly stuff that's common enough to be of next to no scientific value.

If it turns out to be of serious scientific interest, you can always allow paleontologists to study it (I was going to say donate it, but there's no reason scientists need formal legal ownership of the fossil in order to study it).
posted by ROU_Xenophobe at 9:38 AM on May 13, 2005

I am an archaeologist, not a paleontologist so some of these problems may not apply. But… It is never a good idea to buy archaeological artifacts from a dealer. Even when the transaction is supposedly harmless (the dealer swears the artifact was collected innocently by X’s great-great-grandfather and has been in the family ever since and it is not like you can put it back in the ground etc. etc.), your purchase increases the demand for these items which increases the price and the profit which in turn creates new incentives for looters to go ransack sites. And there is also no way to trust the dealer’s assertion that the object was collected before anyone knew better.

Of course the ultimate problem with looting from a scientific point-of-view is that looters never record the contextual information that professional archaeologists record, and without the contextual information most artifacts are close to worthless. From another point-of-view looting is also problematic because it shows a complete disregard for the culture that is being looted from.

Of course paleontology is different. Context is important, but not quite as important as in archaeology. Also, common fossils are abundant and probably not very scientifically important. Still, my concern would be with how these common fossils were being collected or mined and what problems may be created by the method. I think your concern is warranted, and hopefully someone with more knowledge of paleontology will be able to address your questions.
posted by Tallguy at 10:26 AM on May 13, 2005

The question is not whether it's morally right. The question, partially answered by Tallguy, is if my apalling mental image of the business is correct. In which case, it's definitely inmoral.
posted by magullo at 11:03 AM on May 13, 2005

I'd ask a paleontologist about the fossils you're interested in. He or she will probably be able to tell you if they're "safe" to collect, and if not will likely know who to call to sic the fossil police on the salesperson or supplier.
posted by caution live frogs at 11:48 AM on May 13, 2005

Yeah, you'll be impeding scientific progress in some small theoretical way.

But it's not like paleontology is so vitally important that you have a moral obligation to ensure that it happens unimpeded. Nobody's ass is on the line -- there are no health discoveries at stake or anything like that.

Which is probably harsher than I mean. But it still strikes me that to keep a common fossil in your home as an art object that will be enjoyed by you and others is probably at least as good a use for it as it being theoretically part of a study but actually moldering in a basement drawer forever, occasionally if ever actually examined in any way.
posted by ROU_Xenophobe at 12:22 PM on May 13, 2005

I agree with _frogs. Ask a paleontologist first. If the specimens truly are as spectacular as you say, it seems unlikely to me that they are of no true scientific merit. They may also be of questionable accuracy---I have heard of dealers who will assemble parts from several different creatures to make a complete-looking skeleton.

Fossil poaching is not uncommon in the western Plains states. There are the kind with guns and so forth, and then there are those who buy off ranchers and pull fossils out of the land. This is good in a way---ranchers are often hard-up for cash and paleo departments at most universities can't afford to pay them to dig. But, like Tallguy warns, the context from geology and adjacent fossils is lost forever, and poachers really don't seem so much as concerned about reconstructing an accurate animal as making lots of money.

As for "nobody's ass is on the line"---come on now! Just because you haven't been able to think of a practical use for paleontological knowledge doesn't mean that it doesn't exist. Learning more about the ancestry of plants and animals is worthwhile, and perhaps there are medically relevant facts to derive from it. My aunt and uncle, both paleonotologists in Nebraska, are using fossil records to learn more about the geological development of North America, something that may lead to better knowledge of the locations of minerals and other resources.

And even if paleontology didn't have any practical benefits, it seems a terrible waste to me to turn some piece of valuable natural history into a dusty curio somewhere. Again, you are saying "foot-long specimens", and I would be surprised if these were especially common or of limited interest to researchers. These are people who sift through loose fill for fragments smaller than a fingernail.

I could probably ask my aunt and uncle for you if you're curious about specimens in the shop. They specialize in prehistoric mammals. But a paleontologist in your area will surely be happy to speak with you.

Here's an idea, though. If you want a cool looking skull for your desk, why not pick one from a modern animal? Or get casts of fossils instead of the real thing? There are plenty of places online that sell these things, or, write again and I can ask my aunt and uncle about a reputable dealer.

(Written as I glance at the armadillo skull gracing my windowsill, a gift from my aunt.)
posted by tss at 6:44 PM on May 13, 2005

My wife's take:
"If you live by the shop, why not just appreciate the fossils in the window there?"
posted by Aknaton at 6:50 PM on May 13, 2005

it seems a terrible waste to me to turn some piece of valuable natural history into a dusty curio somewhere

We're both saying the same thing on that count. It's not like there's any appreciable probability that someone is going to look at one of the fossils in question and make a ground-breaking discovery, or be sparked to devise some interesting theory that tells us something about how we live now, or anything like that. Most likely it would end up being a single anonymous data point in a footnote to an addendum to an appendix, examined and cataloged once and then tucked away forever as, well, a dusty curio.

If magullo picks one up, at least someone will actually see the fossil on a regular basis, and be moved by its structure and age, and talk to guests about it, and all that.
posted by ROU_Xenophobe at 9:39 PM on May 13, 2005

Yabbut, see, we can have our cake and eat it too. Magullo can get a reproduction and the real fossil can go into the university archives, where, thirty years hence, if some enterprising grad student decides that it wasn't a Latinus nameus but instead a Greekus monikerus, they can brush the dust off and see the specimen first hand. Don't think it doesn't happen ever. I know that the likelihood of any one fossil getting revisited may be low, but it's there. My aunt and uncle have made road trips on several occasions to trade fossils in the UNL archives for those at the American Museum in New York, the same dusty curios that have been in boxes for years and years. It's just that at some point they became relevant again to someone's research.

If people start making a habit out of getting reproductions instead of the genuine article, which subserves only the frivolous desire to feel like you've got the real thing, then poachers are out of business and no science stone gets left unturned. Sounds nice, doesn't it?
posted by tss at 10:24 PM on May 13, 2005

Magullo can get a reproduction

What's the point of that? At that point, why not just pay a sculptor to come up with fantastical fossils of griffons and hydrae, or put up charmingly childish crayon drawings of trilobites, or get a coffee-table book? The point, as I see it anyhow, is to marvel at this thing, and wonder about its life, and what its eyes (if it had any) saw, and what killed it, and whether it was your actual ancestor. A reproduction, much like Casey the doll, is just a piece of plastic.

if some enterprising grad student decides that it wasn't a Latinus nameus but instead a Greekus monikerus, they can brush the dust off and see the specimen first hand

If they seriously gave a damn about it, they could work to put together a registry of fossils with photos and the same enterprising grad student could ask Magullo to mail it to him for a month, or drop by Magullo's house to look at it.

It's just that at some point they became relevant again to someone's research.

But I think Magullo's enjoyment, and that of the others who see it there, is at least as important as that research, and that their research is at base about as frivolous as someone's desire to have a piece of the past in their home, at least for not-particularly-interesting fossils.

I bristle at the notion that every other interest in something must always take a backseat to the particular interests of academic researchers in that area. If it were in a field that was more clearly aligned to betterment of human life, maybe, but paleontology, like my own field, is more of an overgrown hobby than something that's directly useful to others. It just doesn't seem like something so vitally important that regular people must be kept away from them.
posted by ROU_Xenophobe at 11:51 PM on May 13, 2005

Bear in mind also that having wonderful fossils on display is part of what creates paleontologists (and thus paleontology) in the first place.

Magnificent fossils are common, important fossils are rarer and very valuable. If you can afford to buy it, I would think that pretty strongly suggests the dealer doesn't think there is a chance of it being anything important, it's merely magnificent.

Perhaps take a digital snapshot, in the store (no flash), of the piece you are interested in, email it to a local paleontologist (or a university department) to get an "that's ok" appraisal on it, and then buy it (assuming it's ok).

That deals with the particular fossil you have your eye on. As to whether buying ANY fossil - or even a poster or plastic dinosaur - is a good idea if the money might be going to an industry that is detrimental to science, that's a seperate issue. You might want to talk to the store owner about how they source their fossils and this issue, and email a local paleontologist to get their take. Maybe some businesses are more responsible than others. Maybe they all draw on the same suppliers. As you can obviously tell, I'm in no position to offer advice. Not that that stops me :-)
posted by -harlequin- at 12:30 AM on May 14, 2005

Harvesting fossils is not necessarily benign. Harvesting any mineral has an impact on the environment, even if it's not strip-mining.

When I was young, I was part of a group that found a new part to a well-known wild cave. The known part was bare rock everywhere. The new part was densely covered with beautiful, fragile formations of many types. I went back to the cave some years later. The new part now looks like the old part: bare rock, and nothing else. Mineral-hunters and souvenir-seekers have completely removed all the formations. The vast majority of the harvested formations are doubtless now residing in landfills, because they don't look that great in small pieces, in daylight.

Removing minerals from caves is now illegal in most of the U.S. If any of the fossils in the shop were removed from a cave, they were probably obtained illegally. By buying one, you'd be supporting an illegal activity.
posted by Kirth Gerson at 4:59 AM on May 14, 2005

A reproduction, much like Casey the doll, is just a piece of plastic.

Science is not obligated to suffer for magullo's lack of imagination. If seeing the reproduced bones and joints of a 25 million year-old animal just doesn't do it for you because it isn't the genuine, actual, honest-to-god out-of-the-earth original artifact, then I would suggest indulging a different interest.

I am assuming, and I believe it's true, that for the same price you pay for a real, large fossil (that's hundreds or thousands of dollars), you can get a quality cast reproduction, complete with the weight and coloration of millions of years of petrification. This is the kind of thing they have in natural history museums; it's not shiny plastic. I maintain that with such imitations, magullo lacks at home the equipment that would allow him to tell the difference between the reproduction and the real thing. Certainly his young kid/nephew/godchild/whatever can't, and so there's no risk that it'll turn a budding interest in paleontology into an accounting career.

If they seriously gave a damn about it, they could work to put together a registry of fossils with photos and the same enterprising grad student could ask Magullo to mail it to him for a month, or drop by Magullo's house to look at it.

I could live with that. But why bother? Why risk that the artifact gets lost or eBay'd? I still have a hard time believing that a quality reproduction isn't good enough.

If it were in a field that was more clearly aligned to betterment of human life, maybe, but paleontology, like my own field, is more of an overgrown hobby than something that's directly useful to others. It just doesn't seem like something so vitally important that regular people must be kept away from them.

I think this dismissive characterization of paleontology is simply wrong. It can be, and is, scientifically relevant today. There's the geological research I mentioned above; here are two further examples.

1. There is a great deal we still don't know about the brain. Most studies focus on the structure or activity of the organ in living, modern creatures, but like everything else, the brain developed under evolutionary pressures just like everything else. Why are things laid out the way they are? What's vestigial and what's new? By studying fossilized braincases, or in some circumstances preserved tissue, we can include historical insights into today's efforts to map modern brains. This has real medical relevance. We need every resource we have to figure out the brain, old and new.

2. Sometime in the Miocene, a supervolcano in Idaho exploded, casting ash over most of the Great Plains and beyond. There was a mass death of millions of animals, some of which you can see today at Ashfall Fossil Beds near Orchard, NE. As you surely know, the Idaho supervolcano has a modern contemporary: Yellowstone. It may go off tomorrow, or it may go off in 10,000 years, but wouldn't it be nice to know more about what happened before so that we have some idea of what to expect? Who lived? Who died? What was the ash like? (Answer: like microscopic shards of broken glass. The animals weren't instantly asphixiated---it was instead a slow death of a thousand cuts inside their lungs. Good to know.)

Like any science, paleontology might be full of discoveries of minimal relevance, but it does have some important ones---important for science (c.f. above) and important for popular interest (c.f. Sue the T. rex). The artifacts at the heart of these discoveries are embedded within a chronologically significant matrix of earth, stone, and other fossils. This arrangement is crucial for any paleontological discovery, and once it's disturbed, it's gone forever.

Because this resource is so fragile and irreplaceable, I feel we need to foster a culture of proper stewardship of the fossils. Let the paleontologists at them first, every single time. If there's a chance of scientific interest, let them keep it. Make and use good reproductions instead of the real thing. Shun purchases that might support poachers.

And lastly... I'm having a hard time seeing private ownership of high-quality fossils as being more "public" than even storage in a university archives somewhere. Cost will ensure that it's a privilege enjoyed mostly by the wealthy; at the university, the knowledge from the fossil can be used by everyone everywhere. I think that's the best way.
posted by tss at 7:56 AM on May 14, 2005

Another thought occurs to me - if one does, in the end, decide to buy a fossil, it would seem to be good practise to only buy one where they'll provide the relevant contextual data regarding where it was found, etc. This way, you preclude dealing with outright looters, the industry is encouraged to record and keep the contextual information, thus preserving rather than losing any scientific value of the fossil, and you get better value for your money, and it ensures that if you eventually donate it, the donation canl be meaningful.
posted by -harlequin- at 12:21 PM on May 14, 2005

Science is not obligated to suffer for magullo's lack of imagination

Nor is magullo or anyone else obligated to suffer for someone else's science. Again, I simply disagree that academic pursuits are somehow nobler or more worthy than the curiosity or interest of a simple cretin like me.

I could live with that. But why bother? Why risk that the artifact gets lost or eBay'd?

So that someone can enjoy it, instead of it sitting unknown, unobserved, and unloved in a box in a drawer in an unlit corner of a sub-basement.

I still have a hard time believing that a quality reproduction isn't good enough

I'm sure it's fine for some people. For others it wouldn't be, as, oddly enough, tastes differ.

Because this resource is so fragile and irreplaceable, I feel we need to foster a culture of proper stewardship of the fossils. Let the paleontologists at them first, every single time.

Why, when it's obviously-even-at-first-glance just another small ammonite, or just another trilobite, or just another shark tooth?

Ah well. I'll shut up now, since neither of us is going to convince the other. Feel free to have the last word.
posted by ROU_Xenophobe at 2:40 PM on May 14, 2005