“The practice of taking valuable fossils from conquered lands or weaker people is not new, and the powerful emotions evoked by such acquisitions are not uniquely modern. Contention arises whenever rare and valuable geological objects come to light,” wrote the Stanford scholar Adrienne Mayor, who focuses on ancient interpretations of fossils before the advent of the modern science of paleontology. “Large vertebrate fossils have long been tied to cultural identities and power inequalities. Those same links persist in modern-day fossil disputes in North America, in clashes between authorities and
...more
