Why buy fake fossils and skeletons?
Roy Chapman Andrews is something of a legend in the field of palaeontology. Aside from being the real-life inspiration for Indiana Jones, his impressive rise at the American Museum of Natural History (New York) from lowly janitor in the taxidermy department to director is nothing short of inspiring.
This article will not besmirch the good name of Mr. Andrews, but his methods of collecting fossils, whilst of their time, leave something to be desired relative to contemporary scientific practice.
To cut to the chase, the man was notorious for his love of dynamite, a pick-ax and simply digging up the bones. To be fair to the man, time scales, environmental pressures and current understanding at the time paved the way for those methods, however nowadays, things have changed.
I should have said earlier, you are once again reading the thoughts of Joe. Joe is many things, and in his day job he spends a lot of time analysing information taken from the field. Ok, I will stop talking about myself in the third person. But back to topic, I want to talk about information, and how important it is to include and document EVERYTHING.
Information can be presented in its raw form, categorized, presented visually in graphs - but it is the story of what has happened, what is happening and why these chains of events matter that provide the real context.
To draw this back to paleontology, consider how fragile some of the clues within this field of study are - and how easy it would be to miss them entirely. As a hypothetical example, could a paleontologist practicing in the early days of the field have destroyed clear evidence of feathers on a tyrannosaurus rex simply because they were keen to dig it out of the ground? That is an example of evidence hypothetically being destroyed, but what about something else - the story?
I recently came across an article title: When mollusks ate dinosaurs: identification of Radulichnus on isolated theropod teeth from the Kimmeridgan of Guimarota (Leiria, Portugal)” was presented by Bruno Maggia, PhD student at the IDL - Instituto Dom Luiz, Faculdade de Ciências da Universidade de Lisboa. That is quite the mouthful . Feel free to read it - it is interesting stuff - but what got my imagination going was a theropod tooth with clear evidence of mollusks consuming the tooth’s calcium. Somehow a predatory dinosaurs’s tooth wound up in the sea, and there is a story there - a fantastic window into the prehistoric - and that’s just from a tooth.
Don’t get me wrong, my wedding ring has a centre inlay of tylosaurus tooth - a tooth I plucked from the ground in Kansas. Not everything needs to be saved in matrix and handed in. But the point I would like to make is that article, that story - it came from a tooth.
If you move in the right circles, you’ll be aware dinosaur remains, and those of other prehistoric animals in general fetch a premium - and if you know where to look and how to milk it - you can make a nice living selling stuff literally waiting in the ground to be found (irritator/fighting dinosaurs/Sue anyone?). I frequently encounter stories calling out how fantastic fossils are not painstakingly excavated, or relinquished to museums. One shudders to think what affluent members of society have in their respective cabinets of curiosities. When I see these cases come across my social media, or when news hits of something selling for outrageous amounts of money I am left with a sense of sadness. What stories have we missed out on? What could someone have unwittingly destroyed. Will the passionate amateur ever have the chance to see or know what secrets were (or could have been) revealed?
Again, I do not want to seem pretentious. I have my own little collection of fossils. But if I was ever to come across something, you can bet I would call it in. As Indiana Jones would say “It belongs in a museum!”.
So yes, we make reproductions of incredible fossils and skeletons of prehistoric species. Sustainably. In all manner of sizes. So before shelling out money for the real article - please ask yourself (regardless of our sales pitch) was it responsibly sourced? Was it prepared in a lab belonging to an academic institution - should it belong to an academic institution?
As luck would have it National Geographic has also posted on this subject today. You can read their article here.
As always, thanks for reading - Joe
