Re: Dinosaur eggs

[cnedin@geology.adelaide.edu.au (Chris Nedin)]

Jim Foley wrote:

>Thanks for the clarification.  Hope you can nail the bastards in court.
>This sounds like Ediacaran fauna, so I appreciate its importance
>(but I thought the Ediacaran stuff was *pre* Cambrian).

The fossils are not Ediacaran, but the same people are up for allegedly
going into a National Park, cutting out a block of quartzite approx. 4.5 ft
by 4 ft containing the type specimen of the Ediacaren sea pen-like form
_Charnodiscus_ and allegedly illegaly exporting it to Japan and selling it
to a Japanese museum. The *type* specimen for goodness sake! Only the most
photographed example of the species and pictured in most books. The museum
returned the specimen after it was traced to them, and now we have it back.
Given the price  Ediacaran fossil go for in Japan there appears to have
been a brisk trade in the fossils. It is not illegal to sell fossils in
Japan nor to import them, so no law was broken in Japan and the museum did
not *have* to return the specimen.

Once again this type of behavior is *not* typical of most collectors, but
there are some real ##*%%'s in any group.

Chris

cnedin@geology.adelaide.edu.au,   nedin@ediacara.org
-------------------------------------------------------------------
Many say it was a mistake to come down from the trees, some say
the move out of the oceans was a bad idea. Me, I say the stiffening
of the notochord in the Cambrian was where it all went wrong,
it was all downhill from there.