Ethics of Fossil Collecting

[RuMert]

Science must be respected and  private collecting supported. Collectors should be proud to donate scientifically important stuff to museums not hiding them in the basement. I'm glad that TFF promotes exactly that. On the other hand collectors should not be considered villains and thieves.They are the ones who collect common specimens that scientists usually discard and find among 1000 common pieces a scientifically important one - which would have never been discovered and studied with limited financial and labour resources available to formal science.

After all it depends on the general level of culture and paleontology popularzation. In a backward society where common people view scientists and collectors as nuts, the latters consider each other jerks and everybody values money above all, quality scientific research is impossible

[erose]

As a museum professional I am going to chime in here on the idea that museums should sell off their less important specimens.  I'm surprised that the museum in Rotterdam did so, but I would guess there were special circumstances that made it possible.  Museums have codes of conduct and ethics as well. Museums must build trust with those who make donations. Selling off gifts or donations would not build toward that trust. And it isn't always clear what is valuable. Research collections may have no display value but be scientifically priceless.  And even art or history museums may own specimens that currently hold no interest but in time will be important. 

 

two cents...

[Sjfriend]

This "collector" holds to the thoughts that private collections are great..

1: to help get the paleontology bug into more young hands. I've always kept pieces that are for give away. And I've done a couple school talks.

2: too many pieces will just erode away without ever being seen by academics. 

3: the academics just can't cover all the ground on their own.

4: I love looking at what I've taken the time to find

 

BUT I believe we should do our part to make sure anything we find that is possibly scientifically important is made available. Either by direct donation or by making sure the right paleontologist is made aware it exists.

 

Of course these are my thoughts and I won't push them on others (though I hate driving through Canada without being able to pick up a piece or 2)

[jdp]

16 hours ago, erose said:

As a museum professional I am going to chime in here on the idea that museums should sell off their less important specimens.  I'm surprised that the museum in Rotterdam did so, but I would guess there were special circumstances that made it possible.  Museums have codes of conduct and ethics as well. Museums must build trust with those who make donations. Selling off gifts or donations would not build toward that trust. And it isn't always clear what is valuable. Research collections may have no display value but be scientifically priceless.  And even art or history museums may own specimens that currently hold no interest but in time will be important. 

 

two cents...

Yes, precisely. Additionally, many fossils just simply cannot be 'sold' because they were collected with permits on public lands. Furthermore, any specimen which has been published on cannot be sold, as it is critical to maintain the record of that fossil for future workers to validate prior findings.

 

I'll also note that quite a bit of science is done on "boring" fossils, so boring fossils still have an important place in museum collections. Maybe someone has a research question that requires measuring 10,000 brachiopod shells. Maybe someone wants to sample isotopes. Maybe someone needs to cut thin sections from a bunch of bones in order to determine how fast an animal grew. Most research is done on boring everyday fossils, especially when there is a large collection of these fossils, not on individual fantastic specimens. I think sometimes hobbyists assume that researchers' priorities are the same as theirs, when this is often not the case. 

[Tidgy's Dad]

19 minutes ago, jdp said:

 

I'll also note that quite a bit of science is done on "boring" fossils, so boring fossils still have an important place in museum collections. Maybe someone has a research question that requires measuring 10,000 brachiopod shells. 

Hmmm. This analogy doesn't work. Could have understood if you'd be said measuring 10,000 shark's teeth (100 even) or theropod teeth, but brachiopods? 

[jdp]

As crazy as it sounds, many of the big macroecology and paleobiology questions that are on the cutting edge of paleontology can only really be asked using extremely common and "uninteresting" fossils, like brachiopods or gastropods or bivalves. But you can only ask these questions if you have enough fossils to assemble these sorts of datasets.

[RuMert]

1 hour ago, jdp said:

cutting edge of paleontology can only really be asked using extremely common and "uninteresting" fossils, like brachiopods

Tidgy's Dad means brachiopods can't be uninteresting unlike theropod teeth that usually are

 

Interesting thought nevertheless. Hobbyists are often glad to collect common fossils, but dream of exceptional ones thinking scientists are bathing in them. But the latters actually also seek common fossils for fundamental research. So common fossils (e.g. theropod teeth) win the day while exceptional brachiopods are left with Tidgy's Dad

[Bone Daddy]

This cartoon oversimplifies things a bit, but it expresses my overall feelings on this subject.

 

[jdp]

50 minutes ago, RuMert said:

Tidgy's Dad means brachiopods can't be uninteresting unlike theropod teeth that usually are

 

Interesting thought nevertheless. Hobbyists are often glad to collect common fossils, but dream of exceptional ones thinking scientists are bathing in them. But the latters actually also seek common fossils for fundamental research. So common fossils (e.g. theropod teeth) win the day while exceptional brachiopods are left with Tidgy's Dad

Ohhhhhh

[ParkerPaleo]

Without amateur collections, there will be very few people interested in fossils.  And even fewer willing to fund the professionals.  Rather than being adversarial with the amateurs, the professional community should work on educating and partnering with the amateurs more.  Whenever a professional has expressed that an item I have is important for their study, it ends up being donated.

 

I'm of the opinion that the attitude regarding all fossils belonging in a museum is what has driven many collections out of the professionals eyes and inflated the prices of fossils on the market.

[jdp]

14 minutes ago, Bone Daddy said:

This cartoon oversimplifies things a bit, but it expresses my overall feelings on this subject.

 

 

I'd say this is actually a complicated issue.

 

I am generally not against private collection of fossils, but it's not as simplistic as "well, they'll all be destroyed if private collectors weren't there to pick them up." Commercial diggers can wreck havoc on a site. Even large groups of hobbyists can do a lot of damage if you're not careful about limiting the amount of excavation.

 

Additionally, large skeletons in the badlands out west, and even small skeletons in harder rock units, actually weather very slowly. In some cases, for example, we will identify a specimen, maybe a skeleton, towards the end of a field season and return to collect it the following year...or over the course of several years. Aggressive private collection, especially commercial collection, can disturb or destroy sites identified by scientists, where we are planning to return the following year for the purpose of collecting the fossil.

 

In terms of construction, infrastructure development, and mining....yes, these do all destroy fossils, but in many places these are done in association with paleontologist consultants to ensure that important fossils are identified in the field, collected, and reposited in public institutions. This is how we end up with fossils like Borealopelta (collected in the SunCor oil sands mine) and most of the Dunkleosteus skulls in museum collections (collected during the excavation of Highway 90 through northern Ohio) among many others. 

 

Again, I'm not saying that we shouldn't have private collection of fossils, but there is absolutely a continuum between "prevent everyone from so much as touching an interesting-shaped rock" and "open season everywhere at all times." How permissive a country, state, etc is willing to be in their legislation depends a lot on the history of relationships between private collectors and the lands they collect on. In places where there are stricter laws, it is generally because there is a history of high-profile bad behavior by collectors. This applies to countries like Brazil, China, Mongolia, and Canada, where there is strict regulation of fossil collection. People have complained in this thread and elsewhere about the restrictions on fossil collection in Alberta; those restrictions are partially a consequence of fossil poaching in Dinosaur Provincial Park and within the National Parks (including Burgess Shale across the border into BC). The current state of legislation in the US is itself a consequence of ethics breaches in the Sue fiasco. 

 

My general approach to all of this is that most of these problems can be resolved with communication and respect, and that passing legislation should only be a last resort. The problem is that even a small number of bad actors can ruin this for everyone. Restrictive laws are actually also a huge pain in the butt for us professionals, as we often have to go through a complex and time-consuming permitting system just to get permission to pick something up and bring it back to the lab. I think we'd all prefer it if everyone could play nice.

[Bone Daddy]

23 minutes ago, jdp said:

 

I'd say this is actually a complicated issue.

 

I am generally not against private collection of fossils, but it's not as simplistic as "well, they'll all be destroyed if private collectors weren't there to pick them up." Commercial diggers can wreck havoc on a site. Even large groups of hobbyists can do a lot of damage if you're not careful about limiting the amount of excavation.

 

Additionally, large skeletons in the badlands out west, and even small skeletons in harder rock units, actually weather very slowly. In some cases, for example, we will identify a specimen, maybe a skeleton, towards the end of a field season and return to collect it the following year...or over the course of several years. Aggressive private collection, especially commercial collection, can disturb or destroy sites identified by scientists, where we are planning to return the following year for the purpose of collecting the fossil.

 

In terms of construction, infrastructure development, and mining....yes, these do all destroy fossils, but in many places these are done in association with paleontologist consultants to ensure that important fossils are identified in the field, collected, and reposited in public institutions. This is how we end up with fossils like Borealopelta (collected in the SunCor oil sands mine) and most of the Dunkleosteus skulls in museum collections (collected during the excavation of Highway 90 through northern Ohio) among many others. 

 

Again, I'm not saying that we shouldn't have private collection of fossils, but there is absolutely a continuum between "prevent everyone from so much as touching an interesting-shaped rock" and "open season everywhere at all times." How permissive a country, state, etc is willing to be in their legislation depends a lot on the history of relationships between private collectors and the lands they collect on. In places where there are stricter laws, it is generally because there is a history of high-profile bad behavior by collectors. This applies to countries like Brazil, China, Mongolia, and Canada, where there is strict regulation of fossil collection. People have complained in this thread and elsewhere about the restrictions on fossil collection in Alberta; those restrictions are partially a consequence of fossil poaching in Dinosaur Provincial Park and within the National Parks (including Burgess Shale across the border into BC). The current state of legislation in the US is itself a consequence of ethics breaches in the Sue fiasco. 

 

My general approach to all of this is that most of these problems can be resolved with communication and respect, and that passing legislation should only be a last resort. The problem is that even a small number of bad actors can ruin this for everyone. Restrictive laws are actually also a huge pain in the butt for us professionals, as we often have to go through a complex and time-consuming permitting system just to get permission to pick something up and bring it back to the lab. I think we'd all prefer it if everyone could play nice.

 

I can't argue with anything said there and I agree with the vast majority of it. Professional/academic paleontology and amateur fossil-hunting do not have to be mutually exclusive. There is room for cooperation.

The degree of cooperation between amateurs and professionals varies from field to field. In meteoritics (planetary science of meteorites), there is a high degree of amicable cooperation between scientists/academics and amateur hunters who recover meteorites in the field. On the other end of the spectrum is the field of archaeology where there is a great degree of animosity between amateurs and professionals (often for good reason, since amateurs have a mixed record in that field). In my experience, I find that paleontology is somewhere in the middle between the two examples of meteoritics and archaeology. I like the idea that the state of Florida allows collectors like myself to legally and responsibly recover fossils from some public lands. On the other hand, I am glad there is some kind of permitting program and regulations to keep the wildest and most destructive impulses of amateurs in check to some degree. As you said, it only takes a few bad apples to ruin it for everyone. I like to think most of us amateur fossil-hunters stay on the right side of the laws and ethics. If amateurs can consistently demonstrate the ability to be responsible in the field and cooperate with science, then scientists and public officials will take a kinder view of our activities.

[jdp]

26 minutes ago, ParkerPaleo said:

Without amateur collections, there will be very few people interested in fossils.  And even fewer willing to fund the professionals.  Rather than being adversarial with the amateurs, the professional community should work on educating and partnering with the amateurs more.  Whenever a professional has expressed that an item I have is important for their study, it ends up being donated.

Agreed.

26 minutes ago, ParkerPaleo said:

I'm of the opinion that the attitude regarding all fossils belonging in a museum is what has driven many collections out of the professionals eyes and inflated the prices of fossils on the market.

This is unfortunately not the case. Museums generally do not have the money to buy many if not most of the big fossils circulating on the market. Most of the market for big ticket items comes from a subset of very wealthy collectors who view these as combination investment-art pieces (e.g. Nicholas Cage). The price inflation is not being driven by museums; it is being driven by wealthy collectors willing to overpay on high-ticket items and who consistently outbid museums. This goes back to the Sue fiasco; most of the top bidders were private collectors and the Field Museum was only able to win that auction by gaining considerable corporate sponsorship from Disney, McDonalds, etc. Sue did not sell for $8.3 million because of the attitude regarding fossils in museums. Sue sold for $8.3m because there are people with massive amounts of money who want something unique to spend their money on. The attitude that fossils belong in museums was largely a response to that, not a cause.

[jdp]

10 minutes ago, Bone Daddy said:

 

I can't argue with anything said there and I agree with the vast majority of it. Professional/academic paleontology and amateur fossil-hunting do not have to be mutually exclusive. There is room for cooperation.

The degree of cooperation between amateurs and professionals varies from field to field. In meteoritics (planetary science of meteorites), there is a high degree of amicable cooperation between scientists/academics and amateur hunters who recover meteorites in the field. On the other end of the spectrum is the field of archaeology where there is a great degree of animosity between amateurs and professionals (often for good reason, since amateurs have a mixed record in that field). In my experience, I find that paleontology is somewhere in the middle between the two examples of meteoritics and archaeology. I like the idea that the state of Florida allows collectors like myself to legally and responsibly recover fossils from some public lands. On the other hand, I am glad there is some kind of permitting program and regulations to keep the wildest and most destructive impulses of amateurs in check to some degree. As you said, it only takes a few bad apples to ruin it for everyone. I like to think most of us amateur fossil-hunters stay on the right side of the laws and ethics. If amateurs can consistently demonstrate the ability to be responsible in the field and cooperate with science, then scientists and public officials will take a kinder view of our activities.

 

100% agreed! "Private" collectors are not necessarily only hobbyists, too. Is a teacher who buys or collects a small assortment of fossils to help teach life or earth science courses a bad person and should they be prohibited from doing so? I think that's ridiculous. I know several TFF members run school or after-school programming using their private collections....again, something which is a major benefit to society. How about programming that takes kids to fossil exposures and lets them dig, while educating them about what it is they're seeing? These things are indispensable. And, as many have said, hunting for fossils as a kid might be a formative experience that leads someone into an interest in science. People who oppose any private ownership of fossils effectively oppose a lot of these experiences, which I think is a net loss for everyone.

 

 

[taj]

Quote

 If you are unhappy with the extent of the fossil displays at your local museum and would like to see more fossils, then please consider contributing to financial support for either temporary or permanent exhibit updates. Museums are not for-profit organizations and often barely make ends meet, and almost never have the money sitting around for major changes to their facilities. This is largely because museums try to keep their entrance fees as low as possible to further their educational missions, with a lot of the finances going towards school-group educational programs. This is especially important for poorer public school districts, which often have their programming provided free of charge. Such programming can be an important experience for students who otherwise might never think they have a chance at a career in science, technology, or engineering.

Well , sometimes yes , but sometimes quite not the case ( I have some example in mind from France ) .

[jdp]

Yes, some of the European museums have the money to make large purchases. This is not the case for most North American institutions. 

[RuMert]

I hope privately collected specimens are not simply lost (no idea of percentage, but I assume most people wont just destroy collections they for example inherit (not counting a couple of dusty rocks|ammo fragments that can end up in the trashbin). So even if they were collected with ruining a site and smuggled out of the country and someone was killed in the process, they are still not completely lost for science. I'm sure somebody evaluates specimens in private collections and there should be some development on that track with maybe  fossil lists, encouragement for conscientious collectors to register their specimens and take at least a 3-D mode/CT scanl if needed (if they wont donate). 

I know there's a big issue with the need to actually donate specimens to make them available for research at any time, but with people unwilling to do so maybe modern technologies can help.

These are just abstract general thought on the subject, but we know even old museum collections provide lots of stunning discoveries, so actually digging into existing private collections could save lots of time and field work

Example: http://www.app.pan.pl/article/item/app007242020.html a sauropod has just been discovered in the Moscow region (99.99% marine environment) by cleaning a couple of verts prevoiusly believed pliosaur

[Uncle Siphuncle]

It would be interesting if academics and private collectors had more of a centralized interface for soliciting/offering/coordinating donations.  Some of us, myself included, may have portions of our collection we know we’ll never display, and may not be very attached to, that could be of interest in active research.  But lack of a centralized portal leaves everyone unaware.  If TFF had a subforum for research donation requests, I wonder what it would take to get more academics to visit and use it.  Or would they request things that no one wants to part with, and grow frustrated.

[Ruger9a]

This seems to be a situation similar to what happened in the Ancient and Roman coin collecting hobbies a few years back.  Many, many common coins, if not all in several countries; were classified as Cultural Heritage, confiscated and forbidden from export or sales.  As a result it drove many collectors out of the hobby.  I've often wondered what happens to the thousands upon thousands of duplicate coins they have confiscated/collected and if they will ever be seen by anyone again.  Now it appears a similar effort may be happening to my hobby - fossils.  I've heard the UK has come up with a solution that has made both the Ancient coin collectors and the government happy.  Any chance the UK collector/government program can be adopted for fossils?  

[DPS Ammonite]

52 minutes ago, Uncle Siphuncle said:

It would be interesting if academics and private collectors had more of a centralized interface for soliciting/offering/coordinating donations.  Some of us, myself included, may have portions of our collection we know we’ll never display, and may not be very attached to, that could be of interest in active research.  But lack of a centralized portal leaves everyone unaware.  If TFF had a subforum for research donation requests, I wonder what it would take to get more academics to visit and use it.  Or would they request things that no one wants to part with, and grow frustrated.

Here is a partial solution for the professionals to find new species and fodder for research and donation. Add your fossils to a database such as our Collections. We hope to allow better searching in Collections so that you sort by several terms at once such as finding all the Pennsylvanian brachiopods from Texas. I would like to see the ability to put unknowns, problematica  and fossils with uncertain ID into the Collections or a companion database so they can be searched too. The are plenty of officially undescribed Pennsylvanian fossils in Arizona: bivalves, corals, sponges and bryozoans. The ability to sort and display them will help amateurs and professionals alike. Imagine being able to sort and view all the hundreds of Pennsylvanian fossils known and unknown from Jacksboro, Texas. (Hint, hint @BobWill ).

[Bone Daddy]

Something else I have been thinking more about lately and it is adjacent to this issue. One knock against amateurs is that most don't respect the science or observe good protocols while recovering, conserving, and collecting specimens. One way to break the stereotype of the ignorant private collector is to practice good scientific protocols when recovering, handling, conserving, storing, labeling, and documenting your specimens.

Whether your grandkids inherit your collection, or it gets donated to a museum, nobody wants a mish-mash collection of fossils stored loose in boxes with no labels, no documentation, and no context. Commercially, a poorly-documented specimen has less value on the collector market. Scientifically, a poorly-documented specimen is of little or no value for research purposes.

I recently took a long look at my personal collection of fossils. My labeling is inconsistent. My documentation is inconsistent. My storage and handling methods are quite good, so I am in pretty good shape there (curation is an interest of mine). I plan on leaving my collection to my grandson with the provision that any fossils he does not want should be donated to an educational or outreach program. I need to sit down and redo many of my labels. I also need to make permanent records of many details that are currently committed to my memory alone (notes about provenance, find circumstances and data, etc). I want him to inherit a professional-grade collection that would be useful for research or have some value on the collector market.

Conduct one's self professionally, respect the science, learn some of the science (as much as you can), and be generous and positive along the way when dealing with other amateurs or professionals. If we all did that, amateur fossil-hunting wouldn't get a bad reputation in some circles.

As for what the wealthy do with their black market dinosaur skeletons, that is another facet of the problem that shouldn't be lumped together with the kind of good amateur paleontology that many members of this forum engage in.

 

Sorry for the long ramble there. This thread got my thinking cap going...

 

 

[Wrangellian]

2 hours ago, DPS Ammonite said:

Here is a partial solution for the professionals to find new species and fodder for research and donation. Add your fossils to a database such as our Collections. We hope to allow better searching in Collections so that you sort by several terms at once such as finding all the Pennsylvanian brachiopods from Texas. I would like to see the ability to put unknowns, problematica  and fossils with uncertain ID into the Collections or a companion database so they can be searched too. The are plenty of officially undescribed Pennsylvanian fossils in Arizona: bivalves, corals, sponges and bryozoans. The ability to sort and display them will help amateurs and professionals alike. Imagine being able to sort and view all the hundreds of Pennsylvanian fossils known and unknown from Jacksboro, Texas. (Hint, hint @BobWill ).

This is a good idea. I think I tried entering an unknown into the collections a while back with this purpose in mind, and got told it's not the place for them, it was more of an identification guide.

[jpc]

On 5/22/2020 at 1:05 AM, FF7_Yuffie said:

 

Yeah, I hate museums doing that unless its too fragile to display.

 

If they cant display it, loan it out. Im sure there are lots of small museums who would love to display that Allosaurus skull thats kept in a vault and would benefit from doing so.

As a guy who works in a museum, let me tell you... you do not want to see all the specimens we have in the back room.  Most of them are truly boring.  Museums are limited in what they display by the amount of space in the exhibits area.   We collect a lot of material, and most  of it is what I call background noise.  For example, we work in Lance Fm bone beds a lot, where we collect several hundred hadrosaur teeth every summer.   And turtle pieces.  My god we have lots. We keep them because they are part of the story of that site.  And just this week, we got a request from a budding young paleontologist who wants to study immature and adult hadrosaur teeth.  This kind of project is why we keep all the pieces of snarge from such sites.  Stuff that really does not make for good displays.  And there is a lot more to loaning out specimens than just saying it.  We only loan to museums that we trust, for instance.   

 

As a guy who works in a museum and also is a private collector, I can say that indeed, there is room for improvement for amateur/academic relations, and it goes both ways.  A lot of good points have been made here and I won't belabor the points more.  Besides, I have some fossils to go prep in the garage.  

[musicnfossils]

2 hours ago, jpc said:

As a guy who works in a museum, let me tell you... you do not want to see all the specimens we have in the back room.  Most of them are truly boring. 

 

That’s very subjective, speaking for myself of course if a museum let me go through their collections I’d spend all day just looking at all the specimens even repeats. I get that most museum-goers only want to see the special items but some of us would surely be happy checking out that stuff. 

[siteseer]

On 5/24/2020 at 3:21 PM, erose said:

As a museum professional I am going to chime in here on the idea that museums should sell off their less important specimens.  I'm surprised that the museum in Rotterdam did so, but I would guess there were special circumstances that made it possible.  Museums have codes of conduct and ethics as well. Museums must build trust with those who make donations. Selling off gifts or donations would not build toward that trust. And it isn't always clear what is valuable. Research collections may have no display value but be scientifically priceless.  And even art or history museums may own specimens that currently hold no interest but in time will be important. 

 

two cents...

 

I'm wondering if the situation with the Rotterdam museum was that curators realized they were running out of storage space and they also recognized they were storing a lot of 19th-20th century-collected fossils that had scientifically-insufficient labels or the labels were lost/illegible.  They just didn't see the point of keeping bones like that when they were running out of room for specimens that are well-labelled.  I would think some of that North Sea material falls into that category.

 

Jess