Keeping The Museum Busy.

[PaleoRon]

I have been donating fossils to museums and educational facilities for decades. For the past several years I have been donating almost exclusively to the Calvert Marine Museum in Solomons, Maryland. Dr. Stephen Godfrey is the curator of paleontology at the museum. I have tortured him repeatedly with boxes of cetacean bones from various river sites where I dive for fossil shark teeth. Most of the material is fairly mundane, but there have been a few surprises as well, including new species.

I have had several people ask me what kind of material I donate, so here is a pic of the last batch of fossils that I took to the museum.

[Fossil Claw]

Very generous.

That's a life time collection for many.

[ZiggieCie]

[njfossilhunter]

I think that its great you donate your important finds to a museum where they can be studied and available for others to study as well. I called Dr Godfrey last week to let him know that I found a leather back turtle humerus from the Miocene deposits and that it was only about 3 inches long and about 98% complete. The humerus was ID by David Parris from the New Jersey State Museum....Parris has wrote a few papers on cretaceous turtles. and new what it was..right off the bat. he even showed me a recent one about 12 inches long that was dredged off the coast of NJ. I sent Godfery a picture of it and he agress with the ID. I have to send him some picture of other finds I told him about and as well as take them to him to confirm what species they are.. what would they do with out us.....LOL..

Edited July 31, 2015 by njfossilhunter

[Cris]

Very nice Ron. Here in FL, we have a fossil permit system. I try to bring in stuff in know the museum paleontologists will like and want donated when I go to renew every year. Here's some 1.8 million year old micro vertebrates from a while back.

How do you like that full face mask?

[njfossilhunter]

Very nice Ron. Here in FL, we have a fossil permit system. I try to bring in stuff in know the museum paleontologists will like and want donated when I go to renew every year. Here's some 1.8 million year old micro vertebrates from a while back.

blancansmallfossils.JPG

How do you like that full face mask?

Those are some cool micro fossils..I use the same type of displays for my small stuff.

[JohnJ]

I have been donating fossils to museums and educational facilities for decades. For the past several years I have been donating almost exclusively to the Calvert Marine Museum in Solomons, Maryland. Dr. Stephen Godfrey is the curator of paleontology at the museum. I have tortured him repeatedly with boxes of cetacean bones from various river sites where I dive for fossil shark teeth. Most of the material is fairly mundane, but there have been a few surprises as well, including new species.

I have had several people ask me what kind of material I donate, so here is a pic of the last batch of fossils that I took to the museum.

IMG_5942.JPG

Sounds like a mutually beneficial arrangement without fanfare. Thanks for posting this.

[PaleoRon]

Very nice Ron. Here in FL, we have a fossil permit system. I try to bring in stuff in know the museum paleontologists will like and want donated when I go to renew every year. Here's some 1.8 million year old micro vertebrates from a while back.

blancansmallfossils.JPG

How do you like that full face mask?

It's nice when the water is cold and it doesn't fog up. I get better viability than I do with a regular mask. It tends to get snagged a lot when I'm diving in places that have a lot of trees on the river bottom so I still use a regular mask on occasion.

[Fossildude19]

Well done, both Ron and Cris!

This is the way paleontologists and "amateur" collectors should interact.

Kudos, to you, both.

Regards,

[Mike Pocock]

Very good thing to do, however I have 1 question for you, in the UK quite often donations are made to a museum and the museum then puts a tag on them and puts them in to storage and no one ever sees them again.

Is the case with American museums or do they display donations?

Regards

Mike

[Auspex]

Very good thing to do, however I have 1 question for you, in the UK quite often donations are made to a museum and the museum then puts a tag on them and puts them in to storage and no one ever sees them again.

Is the case with American museums or do they display donations?

Regards

Mike

Any museum worth the title will have 99.99% of its collection curated in storage. When all is said and done, this is their mission.

The stuff on public display is basically for fund raising.

[FossilDAWG]

Very good thing to do, however I have 1 question for you, in the UK quite often donations are made to a museum and the museum then puts a tag on them and puts them in to storage and no one ever sees them again.

Is the case with American museums or do they display donations?

Regards

Mike

It's a bit inaccurate to say that no-one ever sees them again. Researchers see them, and in paleontology (and the taxonomic branches of the biological sciences) museum collections are the core of their work. Consider the following:

1. All species will have some degree of variation between individuals. In the past, many species were named based on one or two specimens that seemed to be a bit different from the one or two specimens that had been used to name another species. However, these two species that seem to be different might just be based on a few specimens that happened to come from opposite ends of some variable trait. Suppose you were a paleontologist 20 million years in the future, you find a human skeleton of a 200 cm (~6 foot) individual, and you name a species based on this. Later you find another skeleton, but this one is only 120 cm. Is it the same species, or a second, smaller species? Really, the only way to know for sure is to have a large sample (a population) to study, big enough to do rigorous statistics on. If you find that when you graph the size distribution the average skeleton is 140 cm and the plot makes a bell curve that runs up to 200 and down to 120 cm, you know that your two skeletons are just extremes of one variable species. If you find the plot shows two bell curves, one centered around 120 and the other around 200 cm, you can be confident you have two species. To do this you need lots of specimens, with good collection data for every one so you can be sure you are not having your analysis confused by mixing specimens from different ages and formations. Also, as a researcher you have to be able to get access to the specimens and collection data, something that would be impossible if you had to deal with several hundred private collectors, each with one or two specimens and with varying data collection and archiving standards. Museums are the only practical way of accumulating such collections and data. However, no museum has the display space to show 500 specimens of the same thing, and that would be a boring exhibit for the public anyway.

2. Localities come and go. Many quarries that were critical to understanding the succession of rocks and fossil faunas closed and were filled in or overgrown decades ago. However, the data that was exposed for a while is still accessible for research today, in the form of collections that were well documented about what specimens came from what layer. Most of these specimens will not be showy enough to elicit ooo's and aah's from the public, yet they may be critical to untangling the history of the rocks and establishing correlations with far away outcrops. Museums are designed to maintain such collections and make them accessible to researchers.

3. Science is based on the ability to repeat what other people have published. In paleontology, this means the collections used for research have to be available for other researchers to try to replicate or add to the analysis. In experimental science, that means you have to describe what you did in enough detail that other people can repeat your experiments precisely. In paleontology, that means people have to be able to look at the same specimens you used for your research and repeat the measurements you made, and perhaps make additional measurements you did not do. This is especially important when people describe new species, as the actual specimens used to describe the species have to be available to subsequent researchers, forever. That is the only way researchers can really make a side-by-side comparison necessary to determine if two species are truly different. Every written description is an interpretation, a statement of what the author thinks she or he is seeing. That description (especially in older papers) is also often very incomplete, focusing on a few features the author judges to be important. Later other researchers may decide that additional characters are important, or they may realize that the features that seemed important to the first author are actually highly variable and aren't actually very useful to distinguish species. At that point if you don't have the actual specimen and only have the old vague and incomplete written description you really don't know enough to decide if the species is valid or not.

These days, at least where dinosaurs are concerned as many species are being described from specimens that have been stored in museums for decades or longer as are being described from freshly collected specimens. Perhaps the new species are recognized because this is the first time in a long time that someone with the necessary expertise looked at them, and perhaps they have been sitting in a plaster jacket waiting to be cleaned and prepped. Either way, the knowledge of that species has been preserved because there was a museum able to take care of the specimen until the right researcher could work on it.

Don

[PFOOLEY]

It's a bit inaccurate to say that no-one ever sees them again. Researchers see them, and in paleontology (and the taxonomic branches of the biological sciences) museum collections are the core of their work. Consider the following:

1. All species will have some degree of variation between individuals. In the past, many species were named based on one or two specimens that seemed to be a bit different from the one or two specimens that had been used to name another species. However, these two species that seem to be different might just be based on a few specimens that happened to come from opposite ends of some variable trait. Suppose you were a paleontologist 20 million years in the future, you find a human skeleton of a 200 cm (~6 foot) individual, and you name a species based on this. Later you find another skeleton, but this one is only 120 cm. Is it the same species, or a second, smaller species? Really, the only way to know for sure is to have a large sample (a population) to study, big enough to do rigorous statistics on. If you find that when you graph the size distribution the average skeleton is 140 cm and the plot makes a bell curve that runs up to 200 and down to 120 cm, you know that your two skeletons are just extremes of one variable species. If you find the plot shows two bell curves, one centered around 120 and the other around 200 cm, you can be confident you have two species. To do this you need lots of specimens, with good collection data for every one so you can be sure you are not having your analysis confused by mixing specimens from different ages and formations. Also, as a researcher you have to be able to get access to the specimens and collection data, something that would be impossible if you had to deal with several hundred private collectors, each with one or two specimens and with varying data collection and archiving standards. Museums are the only practical way of accumulating such collections and data. However, no museum has the display space to show 500 specimens of the same thing, and that would be a boring exhibit for the public anyway.

2. Localities come and go. Many quarries that were critical to understanding the succession of rocks and fossil faunas closed and were filled in or overgrown decades ago. However, the data that was exposed for a while is still accessible for research today, in the form of collections that were well documented about what specimens came from what layer. Most of these specimens will not be showy enough to elicit ooo's and aah's from the public, yet they may be critical to untangling the history of the rocks and establishing correlations with far away outcrops. Museums are designed to maintain such collections and make them accessible to researchers.

3. Science is based on the ability to repeat what other people have published. In paleontology, this means the collections used for research have to be available for other researchers to try to replicate or add to the analysis. In experimental science, that means you have to describe what you did in enough detail that other people can repeat your experiments precisely. In paleontology, that means people have to be able to look at the same specimens you used for your research and repeat the measurements you made, and perhaps make additional measurements you did not do. This is especially important when people describe new species, as the actual specimens used to describe the species have to be available to subsequent researchers, forever. That is the only way researchers can really make a side-by-side comparison necessary to determine if two species are truly different. Every written description is an interpretation, a statement of what the author thinks she or he is seeing. That description (especially in older papers) is also often very incomplete, focusing on a few features the author judges to be important. Later other researchers may decide that additional characters are important, or they may realize that the features that seemed important to the first author are actually highly variable and aren't actually very useful to distinguish species. At that point if you don't have the actual specimen and only have the old vague and incomplete written description you really don't know enough to decide if the species is valid or not.

These days, at least where dinosaurs are concerned as many species are being described from specimens that have been stored in museums for decades or longer as are being described from freshly collected specimens. Perhaps the new species are recognized because this is the first time in a long time that someone with the necessary expertise looked at them, and perhaps they have been sitting in a plaster jacket waiting to be cleaned and prepped. Either way, the knowledge of that species has been preserved because there was a museum able to take care of the specimen until the right researcher could work on it.

Don

Word. I had to come to grips with the fact my donated specimens may very well sit on a shelf for years and years...at least I know they are available for that research whenever the time may be.

[Ridgehiker]

Very good thing to do, however I have 1 question for you, in the UK quite often donations are made to a museum and the museum then puts a tag on them and puts them in to storage and no one ever sees them again.

Is the case with American museums or do they display donations?

Regards

Mike

Good observation.

I'm vigilant who I donate my fossils to. Not just any museum.

The reality is few museums have the resources or long term stability to properly maintain large volumes of specimen stored away in their darkest dungeons. Anything other than good display pieces should be given to some institution that has excellent curation facilities and is involved in research of some type.

I have donated 'visual' rocks and fossils to small museums...they will be out in a case and there for all to appreciate. Anything that has more of a potential scientific purpose, I have donated to research based institutions. Few universities have curation facilities...they use specimens for teaching purposes. You may not mind your common ammonite passed around a classroom then thrown in a drawer...but no need to donate something rare for this purpose.

I give away lots to enthusiastic individuals. Rarely does a kid leave my house without a hadrosaur vertebra and a raptor tooth. Hopefully it will stimulate his enthusiasm for natural history.

Years ago a friend who collected native artifacts used to donate arrowheads, etc. to a reputable museum. Later he got a position with the museum...he saw first hand what happened to the dozens of donations. There were large wooden barrels filled with arrowheads.

Edited August 15, 2015 by Ridgehiker

[PFOOLEY]

...Rarely does a kid leave my house without a hadrosaur vertebra and a raptor tooth...

What's your address?

[JohnJ]

What's your address?

You're about 14, now, aren't you?

[JohnJ]

.... Consider the following:

....

Don, for those that are curious and want to understand, you've summarized some excellent information.

[Mike Pocock]

Thanks Don,

Very good of you to take the time for your post, I mean no disrespect to those who donate and certainly not to museums, I guess that I am a visual person and so enjoy looking and touching, I fully understand the need to research and realise the important work that museums carry out and I further have great respect for those who have more knowledge than me. I am nothing more than a person with a passion for his hobby (and that's what it is I do not make a living from palaeontology)and my knowledge is limited from reading and a 10 week open university course that I took last year.

My understanding of fossils is rudimentary and basic but it dose not stop me from loving my hobby and being fascinated with the things I find, I admit that I don't feel the burning need to fully understand the fossils place in nature or to investigate the species of each find. However that said I am meticulous in recording what I find with written details of when, where, images and sketches of what I find.

This site is a continuous help to those who use it and the combined members knowledge is probably the equal of most museums, so I suppose that by using the site I am contributing in my own way to the advancement of knowledge.

I came late in life to fossil hunting and get a great deal of pleasure from it and hope to continue doing so for many years to come.

Yet again thanks for the informative post.

Regards

Mike

[Mike Pocock]

Hi Canadawest, surely we are all little boys and girls at hart, so I will ask as well, what's your address

Regards

Mike

[Auspex]

In the 70's, the Smithsonian had a facility called "The Naturalist Room", wherein amateurs could hands-on study B-grade specimens from throughout the museum's collections. Over time, it proved to be impossible to keep track of everything. It was a great idea, but the manpower necessary to 'curate' everything proved to be beyond their capability to provide.

I give them an A for effort, and understand that a program like this would take serious funding to succeed.