Fossils for sale
From "52 More Things You Should Know About Palaeontology" edited by Alex Cullum and Allard Martinius, Agile Libre Publications, 2017.
Back in the late 1970s, there was an uproar in Britain's normally reserved palaeontological community. Commercial fossil hunters, mainly from the European mainland, had arrived in the country with power tools and explosives and were excavating well-known fossil sites, including type localities and Sites of Special Scientific Interest (SSSIs). What bugged the palaeontologists was not just the apparent destruction of the sites, but also the fact that these people were out-and-out professionals, with no interest in the fossils save for their money-making capability. In some cases they even hired helicopters to airlift their haul, so clearly there was a lot of money to be made by adorning the mantelpieces of the well-heeled.
A by-product of this invasion was that the localities now had spoil-heaps, full of fossil fragments discarded in favour of the perfect specimens. These reports came to the attention of me and my old college friend Mick Oates, fossil-hunter extraordinaire, so we decided to visit a few and see what we could scavenge.
Our first visit was to the Silurian shales of Lesmahagow, near Glasgow, where, as my wife frequently reminds me, I spent my first wedding anniversary covered from head to toe in mud. The locality is famous for well-preserved eurypterids (giant sea scorpions). Sure enough the evidence of commercial activity was there, together with signs written in what I will tactfully call a “mainland European language”, warning away future miscreants. More remarkable, however, was the fact that road works by the local authorities had excavated an order of magnitude more rock. Large quantities of fossiliferous shales had been packaged up into gabions (wire baskets, filled with stones and used to reinforce roadsides) and the best Slimonia tail section found that day had to be carefully teased out through a wire mesh. Not quite what we'd been led to expect.
Next stop was Orkney, where the bituminous flagstones of the Devonian Sandwick Fish Bed contain beautiful lacustrine fossils, including some of the earliest lungfish. Once again, the reality didn't quite seem to justify the reports or the red-faced indignation. The main locality there was in fact a disused quarry, and the wicked exploiters had created new exposures where previously there had just been a weathered rock face.
Mary Anning of Lyme Regis
A theme is emerging, is it not? Nobody wants to see an SSSI obliterated, but re-opening of a degraded locality is another thing entirely. And in order to have a classic fossil locality, something has to create the exposure in the first place, whether or not we approve of the motives. In fact, it can be shown that many of the most critical fossils in the history of palaeontology came to us, not through the diligence of palaeontologists, but from opportunists looking for some extra income. The gentleman geologists of the 19th Century, who made some of the biggest strides in the history of palaeontology, rarely found their own fossils. They relied instead on workers in the quarries, building sites, railway cuttings and canals who were only too eager to supplement their meagre incomes with a bit of fossil selling. The most famous 19th century fossil supplier was undoubtedly Mary Anning of Lyme Regis, Dorset, the daughter of a carpenter who supported herself and her family by selling fossils found along what is now called the Jurassic Coast. Along the way she made some of the most important finds in palaeontology, including the first Ichthyosaurus and Plesiosaurus, as well as the first British pterosaur, and was patronized by some of the biggest palaeontological names of the day such as William Buckland and Henry de la Beche.
Mr. Wood's Fossils
Significant and sometimes ground-breaking contributions by the professional sellers have continued to this day. The title of “modern-day Mary Anning” unquestionably belongs to Stan Wood, a self-taught fossil dealer and enthusiast from Edinburgh, Scotland. Unlike Anning, who found most of her specimens by braving dangerous rock-falls on the foreshore, Stan wasn't averse to using a mechanical digger in the middle of a suburban area (with permission, I assume). Stan brought revolutionary extraction and preparation techniques to the science, supplying fossils for research and display worldwide. He eventually became a paleontological celebrity through his many discoveries, which included one of the earliest reptiles, the Carboniferous Westlothiana lizziae. Stan passed away in 2012, but his business, Mr. Wood's Fossils, continues in Edinburgh.
So it seems there has always been a somewhat uneasy symbiosis between palaeontologists and the fossil sellers. But perhaps now, at time of writing, the pendulum has swung too far in the commercial direction. Fossils are big business – they have become globalized and are just too available. At a reasonable price, any home can have one of those beautiful brown sectioned Madagascar ammonites (mostly Cleoniceras, Albian) or a slab of those ubiquitous Moroccan nautiloids, polished beyond all recognition. On the one hand it's good that the fossils are there for all to see. On the other hand they are devoid of context; as with many globalized commodities, we have become desensitized to what they actually mean. For me, nothing comes close to finding a well-preserved fossil in situ, opening a window into an ancient and vastly different world. No mantelpiece specimen you can buy can replicate that sense of wonder and mystery.
