Re: psittacosaurus psale

[Danvarner@aol.com]

In a message dated 12/7/01 8:20:02 AM Pacific Standard Time, 
longrich@alumni.princeton.edu writes:


<< I can't say I have arrived at any sort of firm conclusions with respect to 
these difficult issues, so I'm not going to argue one way or the other, but I 
think I see some inconsistencies here so I'm going to play devil's advocate: 
if you're going to bitch about paying 200,000 dollars for a unique and 
scientifically interesting specimen of cf. Psittacosaurus as legitimizing 
commercial trade in fossils and commercializing the field, you should 
definitely be complaining even more loudly about a museum going in with 
megacorporations like McDonalds and Disney and paying 8,000,000 dollars for a 
dinosaur whose only real points of interest are that it's (a) close to 
complete and pretty well-preserved ( although many other dinosaurs such as 
the RTMP Gorgosaurus wall mount are similar in preservation and the family as 
a whole is very well represented by fossil material) (b) real, real big 
(can't argue here); and (c) of the generic name (or perhaps brand name?) 
Tyrannosaurus. >>




       Now that is one monster sentence! I don't know the story of the 
psittacosaur other than it was one of the worst-kept secrets of the last 
several years (I heard about it at SVP five years ago), but I do know the one 
of the Tyrannosaur from Chicago. You're right, and I think both of them 
stink. But this is just my opinion and I think you also have to understand 
the history of the specimens before the sale or auction, too. I think the 
problem goes beyond legitimizing the commercial fossil trade--that's already 
happened (fossil dealers are members of SVP in spite of the society's ethics 
statement).  DV