RE: how can they do that?

["Thom Holmes" <tholmes@dolphinsoft.com>]

I, too, am appalled to see valuable fossils put on the public chopping
block, but if they were obtained legally by private individuals and not from
public lands then there's nothing that can be done about it. Just hope some
of it ends up in the hands of people who can study the material. I have no
idea how the foreign material has been obtained or how "legal" it is, but I
do know that it is plentiful. You can walk into a fossil shop in Greenwich
Village (NYC) and buy scores of so-called spinosaur teeth as well. This kind
of material has been exported for sale to fossil shops for a long time. Its
scientific value is dubious once the material has been dissassociated from
its locality without having been documented. The so-called spinosaur teeth I
have seen for sale indeed resemble crocodile teeth. Who knows what they
really are.

Thom Holmes
dinosaur author at large

-----Original Message-----
From: Archaeopteryx . [mailto:archaeopteryx@mail.com]
Sent: Wednesday, August 25, 1999 11:12 AM
To: dinosaur@usc.edu
Subject: how can they do that?


I went to the dinosaur auction at the tlc.com site and I wonder, how is it
legal for them to sell some of that stuff?
I could understand the bugs or 25 million year old bone chips, but they were
selling a lot of rare items.

I mean 100-million year old therizinosaurua eggs? spinosaurus teeth? arent
these things rare enough to belong in a museum?

I mean therizinosaurus itself was first known only from arms and spinosaurus
is only seen in fragments.

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