Fossil Collecting Ruin: Worsening Collecting Potential for Posterity

[hadrosauridae]

16 minutes ago, Crusty_Crab said:

I agree with most of what you've said, but I feel I need to respond to this point. I am a government employee in the US. I can say that most of us are dedicated to public service. I graduated from an elite university but based on my naïve (at the time) notions of serving the public good, I entered civil service. My management's mantra, of which there have been many, due to the frequent changes of political leadership, has always been, what can government do to serve the people. I think you are conflating elected officials with the career civil servants that have been tasked with implementing the latest social media friendly initiatives that their electeds have tasked us to implement. Please don't disparage government as a whole. Most of us are dedicated civil servants, and we are here to serve the people. 

 

If this is your outlook in serving the public, then you are to be commended!  It should be the attitude all civil workers, but you know as well as I, that this is NOT universal.  We could agree to disagree if you feel it is even the norm.  The nature of bureaucracy is to push as much work onto workers as possible.  I know from first hand experience in other interactions when attempting to gain official sanction for something is expressly allowed, can be met with stonewalls and file-13s.  Too may look at the requests (when they are required by ordinance) with "thats someone elses job", or "i dont want to have to deal with that". and the  end result is nobody is ever allowed the official permission slip.  And the other side of the coin, is that the rules to obtain the express permission are made (intentionally) so complex that nobody can meet then, thereby pushing the entire thing away and never having to deal with it.

[Crusty_Crab]

6 minutes ago, hadrosauridae said:

 

If this is your outlook in serving the public, then you are to be commended!  It should be the attitude all civil workers, but you know as well as I, that this is NOT universal.  We could agree to disagree if you feel it is even the norm.  The nature of bureaucracy is to push as much work onto workers as possible.  I know from first hand experience in other interactions when attempting to gain official sanction for something is expressly allowed, can be met with stonewalls and file-13s.  Too may look at the requests (when they are required by ordinance) with "thats someone elses job", or "i dont want to have to deal with that". and the  end result is nobody is ever allowed the official permission slip.  And the other side of the coin, is that the rules to obtain the express permission are made (intentionally) so complex that nobody can meet then, thereby pushing the entire thing away and never having to deal with it.

I said that most of us are dedicated to the public good. It is not universal. True. In science, there is never anything 100%. I cannot say that all government employees meet that threshold. The fact that 100% of people doesn't meet the threshold, doesn't mean that the entire endeavor is useless. Yes, most strive to meet that potential. Yes, some may not meet that. On the other hand, I encounter many that don't get the outcome that they want. There are reasons why we must deny their applications. The fact that we deny that is not proof that government is not working. On the contrary, it is proof that it works. What are the facts? You as the applicant don't get the outcome you wish. What are the facts that support your application? What are the facts that support denial?

[EMP]

On 1/1/2023 at 7:40 PM, Trevor said:

Dear Fellow Forum Goers,

 

Have you found that over your lifetime, the fossil collecting grounds you've so frequently enjoyed and have come to love have degraded?

 

Lately, I have been ruminating on the fact that the popularization of fossil collecting in New Jersey (my local collecting ground) has brought many wonderful things (many new collectors, support for paleontology across the board, and - maybe - additional funding to paleontology communities, institutions, and organizations), but has also engendered / worsened a host of deleterious processes, such as the picking-over of common collecting areas, egregious collecting practices, and some level of local environmental degradation due to an unsustainable amount of collecting (in my case, stream ecosystems, predominantly, are being affected).

 

I suspect I am not alone in feeling this way. It is very easy for human activity to eliminate something good (e.g., human hunting and mega-fauna, overfishing, slash-and-burn agriculture); this seems no different for fossil collecting, but this degradation in fossil collecting seems to have become more noticeable in the last few years, especially given the incentives that the Internet and social media place on people to post amazing or numerous fossil finds.

 

There is something nauseating about knowing that what were once treasured places for you to go will now either be cordoned off to collecting or will be squeezed so thin of fossils that you are left wondering whether it was really a good idea to post that trip report or picture on Instagram or video on YouTube.

 

Main Idea -->: I am interested in hearing about your stories and perspectives on this topic, i.e. fossil collecting grounds you've gone to that have become so miserable due to over-collecting, poor collecting practices, environmental degradation, human development, or other restrictions.

 

For me, I've found that Instagram (30%), YouTube (15%), the Fossil Forum (5%), and Facebook (50%) have all contributed in some way to the degradation of the common stream systems (I put % weights next to these corresponding to my estimates of their impact). This degradation takes the form of too many people collecting in the streams. Some of these people dig in areas they shouldn't, such as the stream embankments, and this increases the risk of certain areas having fossil collecting banned. Many of these people litter the gravel bars with their sifted spoils, which prevents other collectors who want to surface scan from reaping the benefits of a good rain, which is the only reliable form of natural erosion for the NJ Cretaceous stream beds.

 

Kind Regards,

Trevor

 

In all of the years I've been picking cool fossils and rocks off the ground, I can think of way too many sites that have been closed to the public; Tibbs Bridge, St. Clair, Swatara, Mt. Oreb, just to name a few. Even a lot of "my" sites have been bulldozed lately. My last trip out to them I saw that my best trilobite sites have been either covered over or picked clean, so I've stopped posting trip reports. 

 

I don't know if it's necessarily a "good thing" or a "bad thing," as tragic as it might seem to you in the moment. On the one hand, even sites with low erosion rates to expose new material I found that as long as you spaced out your trips every month or so you could reasonably find something new every time you went, even places I knew were popular with other collectors.  On the other hand, not every collector is a good steward of a site they come across, and I've seen all too many examples of people digging into hillsides/cliffs, ripping up plants and animal burrows, leaving rocks along roads, leaving huge holes, etc., which are ultimately why a lot of sites get shut down. I never understood it since in my experience the best finds were always ones that had eroded naturally, anyways. The odds of you finding "the one" by hammering into a rock outcrop are nill, but I guess people see videos online of guys at quarries splitting rocks and so they think blindly hammering away is how you collect. At any rate, sites come and go. Like others have said, I'm sure a lot of "my" sites have been collected at for decades before I've come along, I'm just the latest guy in the queue. 

 

I will say though, things like St. Clair getting closed and what's happened to "my" sites have changed my attitude towards fossils/fossil collecting. I definitely got into the habit over the years of "needing" to find something cool to post online about, and if I didn't do that in a trip I would be pretty disappointed. Shutting down my honeyholes has forced me to find new sites and a lot of the time those sites have either produced less/more poorly preserved fossils, or none at all. In one sense it's bad, but in another sense it's given me a new appreciation of the value of finding "just" a piece of a crinoid, or "just" a brachiopod. When I was really thinking about it on some of my hikes back, the fact that I'm able to find even this much of an organism that lived hundreds of millions of years ago is awesome,, because that "boring shell" had to have survived not just predation and getting smashed by waves, it had to survive burial, compaction, at least three mountain building events, how many thousands of years of human activity, and finally more erosion sitting at the surface just for me to find it. I think a lot of people get wrapped up in this idea that fossil collecting is about scoring it big by finding the biggest shark tooth, the rarest dinosaur bone, or the most whole trilobite, but really fossil collecting is about getting outside, learning more about the history of our planet and life on it, and being able to recover some pieces of that past, no matter how big or small. 

 

 

[Tidgy's Dad]

When I was studying for my geology 'O' level, 'A' level and later at university, we used to visit pen access fossil localities. 

Even back then it was horrifying to see between ten and fifty students rushing about and whacking everything in sight with their hammers. I saw lovely specimens being destroyed because some of the students had no idea what they were doing but 'didn't want the specimens left there to be eroded by nature or ruined by amateurs.' 

I have seen university students breaking chunks off large ammonites embedded in matrix just so they could have a piece of one. Hitting rocks with nice corals, brachiopods and bryozoa just to get to the trilobite that might be within. (but never is).  

On all of these occasions I collected more specimens than anyone else and on at least two occasions more than the whole group combined. But that's just boasting. 

I went to a site in Tunisia which was supposed to have fossil lacustrine gastropods, but couldn't find anything. Local children asked me what I was looking for and I was rather gruff with them at first, assuming they just wanted money. (they did). But when I finally told them I wanted "Escargot" (I know the Arabic now, but didn't then.), they swept the area and came back with dozens of specimens. I did give them some dosh, but only took a few away. They were amazed that I was interested in these "stone snails" but promised to keep looking and save them all for me. So, there are probably a million gastropods waiting for me in a village in the Tunisian sub-Sahara by now, 35 years later. 

 

 

[Uncle Siphuncle]

10 hours ago, Crusty_Crab said:

Really? 

https://www.fda.gov/about-fda/fda-leadership-1907-today/harvey-w-wiley-pioneer-consumer-activist#:~:text=Wiley%2C M.D.%2C was the original,with poor%2C often harmful products.

Dr. Wiley was a government employee, one of the founders of the FDA. He advocated for more government intervention regarding food safety. Do you get your food from the market or a restaurant? Do you trust that the food you eat is free of formaldehyde? If so, you can thank Dr. Wiley and government regulations.  

There are enough examples of govt making a mess of things for me to advocate on a case by case basis for solutions not involving govt.  Quite often, those in decision making govt positions seem to be the least informed entity in the equation, ultimately making things overly complicated or impractical for the end user or stakeholder.

 

A prime example is the spout on your gas can.  Newer spouts are so inconvenient to use that I've spilled more gas on the ground with them than I ever did with an old school spout.  So some do gooders are patting themselves on the back for incrementally trashing the environment with their mandated "solution".  I threw my new spouts away, found old school ones online, and haven't spilled a drop since.  Not everything in life needs improvement.  Some people simply need to sit on their hands.

 

We could go back and forth with examples for and against govt intervention, but most of these examples are irrelevant to the topic at hand, that being fossil resources.  I doubt most in govt are keen lifelong students of all things paleo, so once again, they are the least equipped to make thoughtful and effective decisions impacting the resource.  So in this specific case, in an effort to "do something" without deep understanding, I think govt would end up enacting legislation that further restricts fossil access to people that care about them most, perhaps leaving more than now to simply weather away in the elements.

 

My argument above does not provide a solution to the human nature problem intertwined in the fossil resource sustainability problem.  However, it does present my opinion that govt regulation in this case is a non solution at best, and would quite likely exacerbate the ongoing collapse of quality collecting opportunities for motivated collectors going forward.

[jpc]

as long as we are talking about sites getting shut down, I dare say that gov't reg's have very little to do with it.  Let's look at the insurance industry.    

[FranzBernhard]

11 hours ago, EMP said:

When I was really thinking about it on some of my hikes back, the fact that I'm able to find even this much of an organism that lived hundreds of millions of years ago is awesome,, because that "boring shell" had to have survived not just predation and getting smashed by waves, it had to survive burial, compaction, at least three mountain building events, how many thousands of years of human activity, and finally more erosion sitting at the surface just for me to find it. I think a lot of people get wrapped up in this idea that fossil collecting is about scoring it big by finding the biggest shark tooth, the rarest dinosaur bone, or the most whole trilobite, but really fossil collecting is about getting outside, learning more about the history of our planet and life on it, and being able to recover some pieces of that past, no matter how big or small. 

Thank you so much!!

Franz Bernhard