Re: Paleo-21-avocational paleontologists
On the professional-avocational discussion. I must say I donīt realise that this is a problem. As an avocational paleontologist myself, I have only met the most most intense interest and great helpfulness from the professional side. I mean: I can learn everything about Swedish art between 1860 - 1870 and be pretty good at that without pretending to be an art historian. I can specialise on Precambrian dinosaurs - which is a very, very, very small field - without believing I am an professional paleontologist. When we all have the same interest and donīt compete about jobs we can share both experiences and knowledge. The avocational paleontologist often has the possibilities to spend more hours in the field. If you have a good cooperation it can help the professional - giving him, or her - new material and a pair of extra eyes. Some of the problems are instead as I see it - at least in these parts of the world- the following: The finds made by amateurs should not be rusting in a private boxes. Valuable finds should be described or put in relation to previous finds. Something that mostly have to be done with help of professionals. Important finds ought to be reposited in public collections. (For more discussion, see Chris Cozart: Independent Pleontologists, Issues 1,2 and 3) Those who only want to collect complete beatiful specimens could as well stick to collecting stamps or anything else (there are many beautiful things to collect) that there are millions of. A second problem is connected with the previous. The unsound trade with fossils. As long as anybody want to pay lots of money for a rare specimen (literarily millions of dollars for a dinosaur nest or complete T-Rex), there will be difficulties for poor institutions to get good new acquisitions to the collections and there will also be too many people willing to breake all possible protection laws. There are nowadays (in Sweden) very few active quarries. The old ones are sometimes restored to their former state - getting soft slopes covered with vegetation. Or they are just grown over or used as dumps or motor tracks. Which means that it is difficult both for amateurs and professionals to get fresh material. The Swedish policy has always been to protect threatend areas and objects by law, which often is a useful way, but without proper maintenance, it might get a bad result for science in the end. A small problem for paleontology, but I think a big for archaeology, is, that many public and private workers, _donīt see_ when there is anything interesting coming up in connection with a roadwork or a housebuilding, because that means it must be an investigation made which costs time and money. Best to you all from JOMPA (John Ahlgren)Title: homepagehem
Email me at jompa@mbox304.swipnet.se