The Ethics of Selling Fossils: A Paleontologist's Letter to ThinkGeek.com

Brief Background

ThinkGeek, the popular collectibles merchandiser specializing in everything from Star Trek pizza cutters to USB Missile Launchers, has recently started to sell fossils on their website. Currently available are insect-bearing amber from the Dominican Republic, ammonites from Morocco , and dinosaur bone from the USA . I first learned about ThinkGeek's fossils from a Facebook post made by my friend Jim Kirkland. As a paleontologist who specializes in the management and protection of paleontological resources, I was troubled by this development for several reasons and wrote to ThinkGeek to explain why I felt they should reconsider offering fossils for sale. My message to them is below.

Hi ThinkGeek,

I hate that I am sitting down and writing an email to your Complaints Department. A complaint email, really? To ThinkGeek? You guys are awesome! And to be honest I do I feel like “that guy”, because generally I think anyone who writes complaint emails has nothing better to do than complain. I love ThinkGeek. Your website has been the source of many birthday and Christmas presents for friends and family, and I have received many things from this website’s vendors as gifts myself. My home and office proudly boast:

·         Star Trek TNG Hoodie

·         Star Trek TOS Alarm Door Panel

·         Star Trek USS Enterprise Pizza Cutters (x2!)

·         Star Trek Vulcan Salute Oven Mitt

·         Star Trek TOS Robe

·         Star Trek Captain Kirk USB

·         Chemical Elements Lunch Box

·         Batman Pint Glass

·         Radioactive Element Coasters

·         Chemistry Set Shot Glasses

And probably a few other things I am forgetting. I always look forward to seeing the new items that have been added to the catalog of your website, so it was pretty distressing to see the following item listed for sale:

“Dinosaur Bone Fragment”

https://www.thinkgeek.com/product/hsku/

Aside from being a huge Trekkie, I am also a vertebrate paleontologist. I have spent the past 14 years of my life dedicated to the research and preservation of fossils, and in that time I have worked in many places on many different kinds of fossils with museums, universities, government agencies and even construction developers. My professional title is “Mitigation Paleontologist”, which means I work with resource management. Translation: when fossils are found on any kind of construction site- roadway, parking structure, solar field, housing lot, etc. – my job is to ensure that they are collected with data, preserved, and delivered to a museum. I love what I do.

And that is why I’m really *really* bummed that ThinkGeek is selling fossils. If you look at the image below, you’ll see a clip from my Facebook news feed. It’s how I found out about your fossil bone listing today:

James Kirkland is a friend of mine, and he is also the Utah State Paleontologist. Jim has been part of nearly every major dinosaur discovery to come out of the Rocky Mountain West for over 20 years. Utahraptor, Diabloceratops, Zuniceratops, Eolambia, Falcarius¸and Gastonia are just a few of the iconic genera he has named or assisted in naming. So if he is concerned, you guys can understand that this is pretty serious for paleontologists. Your website is extremely popular, and the fact that you are now selling dinosaur fossils concerns us for a number of reasons.

The debate about whether or not selling fossils is appropriate has many shades and is ongoing. It is perfectly legal provided the fossils come from private land, but for paleontologists the issue lies in whether or not it is ethical. As you can see in Jim’s comment, fossil poaching is a very real problem. Sites all over the country have fallen victim to the piece-meal disappearance of fossils because tourists recognized a bone fragment and thought one little piece wouldn’t hurt. But after 10, 20 or 50 years all those little pieces add up. What once may have been a Diplodocus femur near a trail is now a bone-shaped hollow in the rock(http://mw2.google.com/mw-panoramio/photos/medium/1397421.jpg). Everyone wants to ‘own’ a piece of the past, but the past is a limited resource. There is not an infinite supply of fossils out in the world, and certainly not in the US. I don’t begrudge anyone’s desire to touch and feel real fossils, but the desire to own or keep them for yourself is not a sustainable ideology.

I don’t begrudge ThinkGeek for wanting to provide the public with a way to experience the wonders of ancient life. You sell stuff for “smart masses” after all. However, the unfortunate truth is that selling fossils only helps to propagate the idea that fossils are an unlimited commodity for everyone to have in their home. Fossils are not made in factories. When public interest in fossils increases because of a famous discovery or a new movie (ex: Jurassic World), so does the demand to own them. Unfortunately, the supply for that demand is carved out of our National Monuments and Parks, State Parks, the land of other countries, and even out of my projects. On more than one occasion, I have dealt with people trying to poach fossils from under my nose because they think they will be able to sell them on eBay. In fact, the most common questions I get when excavating a fossil on a project are “What is it?”, “How old is it?” and “What’s it worth?” Time and again I repeat, “It’s not worth anything but the information it gives us.” People look at me like I’m crazy.

It is true that not every fossil is considered scientifically significant. In other words not every fossil preserves enough information to warrant collection and cataloging in a museum. Most fossils I have seen in the field have been “float” or fragmentary, broken, weathered and generally poorly-preserved bits of bone not much larger than a stick of gum. The reality of searching for scientifically significant fossils is that you use everything you see in the field to direct your investigation. In that way the float, the “non-significant” fossils, help scientists tease out the truth of a field area. Fragmentary bone is very useful for adapting a proper search image as fossils will have different colors and appearances due to preservational differences between different formations. The Hell Creek Formation in Montana produces lovely chocolate-brown bone. The Two Medicine Formation just a few hundred miles west produces bone in rich, deeply black colors. Float is also like a breadcrumb trail that fossils leave for paleontologist to follow to what may be a much more complete specimen still buried in the rock. It is fragments like these that you are now selling on your website.

I realize this is long winded, but it is a very important issue to myself and my colleagues and I know that ThinkGeek does carefully consider the thoughts of their customers. Please stick with me.

I would like to ask for your participation in a small thought exercise. I would like you to please read the following paragraph with the understanding that this is how I understand your fossil in my mind- as a paleontologist who loves sharing the wonder of fossils with all people and whose job is protecting fossils so that the fossils and the information that we have learned from them will be available for our posterity in perpetuity.

The fossil bone featured in the photos on the product page is in remarkably good shape. This is interesting because UV intensity in the semi-arid climate of western badlands (where fossils like yours are from) is harsh, and the freezing winters are just as harsh. Bones at the surface get beat up, and if they spend any time exposed to the elements their surfaces lose that nice, shiny luster; they become rough, dull, and very difficult to distinguish from to surrounding sediment. When you find fossil fragments on the ground in the badlands, they often have been sitting in the sun so long that the exposed bone surface is bleached to a pale, chalky orange or chalky white and may have a crusty coat of orange or black lichens to boot. The underside may still be in very nice condition, giving the bone a two-toned apearance. It is my belief that the condition of your pictured fossil bone indicates it is not an isolated surface fragment. Here’s why: 

(Edit: For the reader's sake I have inserted the photos of the item below. This was not in the original email.)

• Your bone’s coloration is relatively uniform. The outer cortical or “compact”  bone is a pleasant creamy brown with a resiny luster, and the interior cancellous or “marrow” bone is a richer dark brown with red-orange mottling.

• The cancellous bone is dense (typical of ribs) and does not exhibit the ‘crumbling’ often seen in surface finds. 

• The sharp, clean, angular nature of the fracture edges and surfaces indicates the fossil was broken recently (i.e. no time for weathering and abrasion to round them). 

• The lack of UV fading, the presence of uniform coloration, the shiny luster of the surface, the intact cancellous bone, and the angular fractures all indicate that your bone fragment was not simply plucked off the surface of the badlands, but may have been collected in association with a larger specimen which was then separated for sale. I am hesitant to state this with absolute certainty, but one other feature caught my eye:

• Small flecks and residue of a whitish material on the cancellous bone. This looks very similar to plaster residue, and if that is true it could mean that this fragment was part of a jacketed specimen.  It could just as easily mean that the fragment sat in a lab and was splattered while another specimen was being worked on. I’m guessing we’ll never know as that information is not generally included with mystery chunks like this. I’ll abstain from going into the drawn out debate about commercial selling of fossils and the problems with specimens lacking context or data (the most important information of any fossil).

These are the kinds of things paleontologists observe in a seemingly innocuous chunk of bone. We wonder where the bone came from- was it the Hell Creek Formation? South Dakota? Montana? Was it collected from private land? Where is the rest of the specimen that isn’t being sold? What is the stratigraphy and sedimentology of the site? Was taphonomic data collected? Will it be available for study? Paleontologists share the wonder of fossils that everyone has, but beyond that we see fossils as data- as little pieces of information that help us unravel clues and puzzles about evolution, ancient ecosystems, and the earth as it existed in the past across incomprehensible chasms of time.

The earth has a finite and slowly decreasing supply of fossils for us to discover. The wonder of fossils is that they allow us to view the earth as a truly alien world, and through scientific study they give us the power of prediction. Fossils are our tools for not simply tracing the evolution of life through time, but for understanding how life responds to both the gradual and sudden changes that are part of life on a dynamic planet. The earth has seen countless changes since it came into being 4 billion years ago. Geologic cataclysms like caldera eruptions and massive volcanic vents, climate change through rise and fall of global temperatures, the encroaching and recession of the oceans, the growth and shrinking of huge glacial fields, the tearing apart and collision of continents, and even extraterrestrial impacts are all recorded in the geologic record.  With those events nearly all the way back at the beginning, over 3 billion years, are fossils of the species that either lived through those events, or ceased to exist forever because of them. Over 3 billion years of recorded life history are at our disposal to study. 3 billion years of evolution, competition, radiation, extinction, mutation, and adaptation. 3 billion years of interaction with climate, changing shores, and much, much more. And every fossil, no matter how seemingly non-significant, came from an organism which played its part in those countless ages.

So when someone asks me what a fossil is ‘worth’, I don’t think about a price tag or eBay auction. I think about our future. Can we, Homo sapiens, survive changes and events like those we know have happened in the past, and that will happen again? And what of the world we are familiar with, the world we call “home”? Not the rocky substrate beneath our roads and civilizations, but the modern ecosystems with which we evolved. How will they respond to rising global temperatures, to increased CO2 in the atmosphere, to dwindling sea ice, and more intense droughts? Because of paleontology, because of fossils, we can begin to assess and attempt to answer questions of this magnitude. What we learn from the fossil record has direct applications to how we anticipate and understand how global changes and events affect our modern ecosystems. We now must understand that fossils are not just show pieces or irrelevant relicts from a disconnected past now meant to be perched on a shelf. Fossils are very much the key to our future- our future as a species, our future as living things, and our future as inhabitants of one, and only one, planet.

I ask the people behind ThinkGeek to please consider the message you are sending by offering fossils for sale on your website. So long as fossils are seen as collectibles, their worth will be bonded to money. As a paleontologist, it is my responsibility to protect fossils as a shared public resource- a resource of knowledge. It is also my responsibility to educate whenever I have the chance. I love teaching people about the true value of fossils, and how they have helped us discover the fantastical and unimaginable organisms that called the earth home long before humans started banging rocks together.

If ThinkGeek truly wishes to share the wonders of fossils with the public, why not consider selling casts? Casts are wonderful because they allow everyone to own a representative piece of history. People often don’t understand that casts are not ‘fake’ or ‘replicas’. They are made out of resin or plaster, but they are not rough facsimiles or sculptures. Casts are precise clones of a fossil’s external morphology used for research and exhibits. Museums trade casts of specimens, researchers use casts if they cannot access the fossil specimen, and exhibits use casts for mounting skeletons because they are light-weight and prevent damage to fossils from handling or just plain gravity. Casts are not fragile like actual fossil material, they do not degrade like fossil material, and they allow the fossil specimens to reside safely in a repository, stored under proper lighting, dust control, and humidity conditions. People do not understand that fossils can and will degrade if not properly cared for. They will break, they will crack, they will fracture, and they will be destroyed through improper handling and storage. Everyone can own a cast of a T. rex tooth (I have several, including a cast of my very first fossil find!), a Smilodon canine, a Triceratops toe, a mammoth tooth, or a Stegosaur plate. There are many ethical businesses that specialize in producing casts for research or for collectors. I suggest you look over these businesses if you aren’t familiar:

https://www.gastondesign.com/

http://www.valleyanatomical.com/

http://www.boneclones.com/

http://www.skullsunlimited.com/

http://www.mcssl.com/store/skullduggery/fossil-replicas

As a parting thought, please consider these questions. My intent is not to draw improper comparisons or make light of other serious matters, but to ask you to think how the sale of fossils compares to the merchandising of other limited resources.  

Would ThinkGeek sell Native American artifacts? Chert flakes? Arrow heads? Cultural and Paleontological resources are protected under the same laws, and not so long ago it would have been perfectly legal to sell artifacts “obtained from an ethical source.”

Would ThinkGeek sell scrimshaw? Though marine mammals are protected under several laws, if whales are legally harvested for research scrimshaw would prevent bones and teeth from being wasted.

Several American fossil dealers have been caught illegally importing fossils from countries like Mongolia and China in the last 2 years. In some cases they knowledgably forged the fossils’ origins on customs forms to bypass legal issues. How sure is ThinkGeek that their fossils are from a truly “ethical source”, and can you or your source provide the documentation necessary to verify it?

I hope you understand that my intent with this letter is not to patronize or point accusatory fingers. I only wished to share my concerns regarding the sale of fossils on your website. “Smart Masses” know that fossils are a non-renewable resource, and several laws are in place to protect them because the people and the government recognize that they are irreplaceable and more valuable than any amount of money, regardless of what happens in an auction house.

I respectfully ask, on behalf of all paleontologists and fellow geeks, that ThinkGeek seriously reconsider selling fossils and consider the ethical and sustainable sale of fossil casts instead.

Thank you for your time.

Sincerely,

Lee

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I sent this letter off via email on Tuesday, October 28 2014. On Thursday, October 30th I received a response from ThinkGeek. I will share their response in a separate post. This one is long enough already!

-Lee 


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