Mastodon for auction
A family in Sebastopol, California (hometown of the MAKE: headquarters!) is auctioning off a beautiful fossilized mastodon. Found on the Fiddler family farm in 1997, the specimen spent several years on display at the Oakland Museum and then in a wine bar. The starting bid at eBay is $115,000, which is apparently way too high. No bids as of yet. From the San Francisco Chronicle:
Link to SF Chronicle article, Link to eBay auction"That's an incredibly inflated price," said UC Berkeley paleontologist Mark Goodwin. "Mastodons are not uncommon. And the commercialization of fossils is a huge problem. It's undermining the science. This is our fossil heritage, and it shouldn't be for sale..."
(Nancy) Fiddler hopes the giant fossil will find a good home, and she hopes it will go on display in another museum. But most of all, she hopes to get $800,000, so she and her family can buy a large ranch and some cars.
"If it doesn't sell, we'll just hang on to it a while longer," she said. "We're not going to give it away."
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This is our fossil heritage, and it shouldn't be for sale...
Other things that should not be for sale by this logic: paintings, seats at the theatre, any memorabilia whatsoever, antiques, any object produced by a non-western culture for sale in the developed world....
My home town! Well maybe what's left of it. What was a beautiful small town has been turned into an uber-liberal hippy convention. And no I'm not a republican. Sad that someone is trying to make a big buck on specimen that should be donated to a local school.
Fun fact: mastodon is Greek for nipple tooth.
Nowhere does it say the fossil has been articulated, or even excavated — there are no pictures of the articulated skeleton (apart from the clip art), and the description describes museum visitors watching "preparators and volunteers as they exposed the bones to prepare them to make casts and molds". I think this is a collection of fossils in situ, and a merely "nearly complete" one at that, which makes the image a bit deceptive.
I didn't even know I had a fossil heritage.
some fool in Dubai will buy for a million dollars to put in his kid's backyard pool
Is $115,000 really that inflated? I don't think you could make a new one for that. There's a presumption that there's a gazillion more of these to dig up at the La Brea Tar Pits. I reckon it'd cost more than 115K to get one out.
Or Mark Goodwin is actually Indiana Jones: This belongs in a museum!
@1
Also, professor's salaries.
Berkeley's trying to get it for free. =)
And this quote doesn't make the sellers seem any better:
Professors don't make that much. Low 100s at the high end.
While we're at it, most doctors and lawyers don't make that much either.
Kyle, low 100's is a lot by any standard, especially when you consider the median income in the US for those fully employed and over 25 is $39,336.
Selling a fossil is no better or worse than selling land, or art, or research. Should a research scientist accept room and board for his or her work? Hell, should oil be sold for something as crass as money?
As Kyle said, $100K is the high end for average professors' salaries — they usually start out around $35K. That's after six or seven years of grad school, with an $18K/year stipend if they're lucky.
The trouble with selling important fossils to collectors is that it makes it much harder to study them. Capitalism 1) drives the prices up and 2) funnels important finds into private collections where nobody can do anything with them. (I'm ignoring the armed thugs who loot archaeological sites in search of cash-and-carry treasures to sell, which are generally damaged in the process.) If you think, as I do, that scientific research is a positive good, then you won't want the tools of that research kept away from scientists.
@13
I might agree, but the professor in question acknowledges that these aren't uncommon. Further, they allowed access to it for several years.
Has Goodman event attempted to make them an offer? It sounds like he's just being greedy.
What logic? There was no explicit syllogism or other logical argument in what you are responding to. Just a disconnected assertion. Trying to draw inferences from that kind of statement is pretty much pointless, as it will reflect your prejudices, not the originators, which are really what you need to address.
The problem with trade in fossils is that it tends to destroy provenance, radically reducing their scientific value. Because it is in general impossible to associate a cardinal value (money) with an ordinal value (in this case the hierarchy of scientific values) there will necessarily be conflicts and incompatibilities between any essentially moral system of valuation and the market.
It is not obvious to me how these conflicts should be resolved, because of course having a relatively free market in most goods and services is itself a moral value, and a fairly important one at that.
I have a mastadon tooth that my grandfather found. It's about the size of a football.
if only you had thought to leave it under your pillow
For the Tooth Neanderthal?
If fossils weren't for sale, where would museums get them?
Maybe some rich schmuck will buy it. Then he'll die, and his kids will fight over the jags and the beach house in Malibu and the ranch in Santa Fe and no one will want these old bones that their crackpot dad had on display in the living room at the "cabin" in Jackson Hole and they'll donate the dusty old mess to some museum for the tax write-off.