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Comment by chess_buster | Hacker News Reader

It's so sad to see fossils being sold.

It leaves a bad taste in my mouth when I see large fossils being hauled out by individuals who have no interest in them, when I approach to chat, other than to sell or illegally export. They remind me of gollum, seeing everyone around them as a threat to their riches.

But a lot of fossils wouldn’t see the light of day unless there was a commercial market. I have heard stories on fossil forums about countries where there are restrictions and quarries will just crush them along with all the other rock.

In my country the vast majority of palaeontology is done by amateurs. There is only so much public funding but loads of amateurs. If private ownership was banned then academic research would go to near zero.

Creating positive incentives for landowners and discoverers is important. This shows up repeatedly as an issue with both archaeological and endangered species discoveries in many countries, including the US, where landowners are strongly disincentivized to report any discoveries since it can have a strong negative impact on the value of their land and their ability to use it. As often as not this leads to the destruction of the thing people are trying to preserve e.g. "shoot, shovel, shut up". [0] It is understandably difficult to get people to act against their own interest.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shoot,_shovel,_and_shut_up

I guess it is the same thing with other archeologic artefacts. Here in germany, if you find something old and remarkable, you must report it and you will get nothing, no matter how long you searched. So most of that stuff is happening illegal and underground, which means that most findings never make their way to the researchers and the public, like this here allmost did not:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nebra_sky_disc

Yes and not. We had burnt fossils for most of our history without any remorse. If there is an economic value attached just because science, and this value is higher than the value of the stuff as coal or rock will be preserved.

Previously people building a road would just shut their mouths and pave over it. Now they have an incentive to pause the job and extract it.

There are untold millions of fossils waiting to be found. We will never have a shortage of them. This would have never been excavated if it were not for the financial incentive to do so.

> untold millions of fossils waiting to be found. We will never have a shortage of them.

I would argue that there are very much a finite amount of fossils. esspecialy of larger animals. fossilization is a rare event.

>fossilization is a rare event.

Indeed, but it has been happening for hundreds of millions of years for billions of individual organisms, and we haven't excavated even a fraction of a percent of their possible locations.

less than 1% of all species to exist have been found as fossils. 1% of a billion is a large number but its still finite and not all fossils are the same. we dont' know their value till they are dug up and studied with teh context of where they were found in tact.

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