Hurum said he had no regrets regarding his purchase of the controversial fossil from an amateur collector, who had kept the fossil in a basement for 25 years since it was initially discovered in Germany in 1983, The Times of London said Thursday.The downside to this, of course, is that people will realize that money is to be made in this sort of endeavor and we may have a return to the problems of the early 1900s when palaeolithic sites all over Europe were "excavated" by people (Otto Hauser being one) who then sold their wears to the highest bidder. The most aggravated example of this in recent times is the discovery of a pivotal Homo erectus skull on the shelf of a curio shop in Manhattan. To be sure this happens more often than we suppose but the precedent is troublesome."It's the only near-complete fossil primate ever found. There is absolutely nothing like it," said Hurum, who took the fossil to the Natural History Museum in Oslo after purchasing it. "She could easily have been bought by a private collector and disappeared for another 20 years."
Friday, May 29, 2009
Palaeontology is Not Cheap!
UPI is reporting that Jorum Hurum admitted that he paid 750 000 dollars for the fossil primate remains named Ida. As the story notes:
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The downside to this, of course, is that people will realize that money is to be made in this sort of endeavor and we may have a return to the problems of the early 1900s when palaeolithic sites all over Europe were "excavated" by people (Otto Hauser being one) who then sold their wears to the highest bidder. I'm not sure why that's a problem. In fact, I would expect it to spur on more excavation and fossil finding, increasing the likelihood of more finds like Ida.
ReplyDeleteOne of the principle problems is that you have no provenance for the finds. You can only guess how old things are based on any sort of concretions that might be left on the fossils, themselves. The other problem is that finds have a bad habit of disappearing for decades, like this one, before turning up in curio shops and the like.
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