Re: paleonet superiority!

[John Van Couvering <vanc@xxxxxxxx>]

To second Peter Roopnarine's comment,  I believe every professional has 
found themselves disappointing an amateur collector at some time in their 
career, because the importance of a discovery in the mind of the discoverer 
is directly -- I would say geometrically -- proportional to the inverse of 
the number of discoveries.  "Oh, another one of THOSE," says the 
pro.  "I'll see if I have time to look at it. Next month maybe. Lot of 
matrix there, and the [throw in morphological jargon] seems to be 
missing.  Eh."  Even worse, if in a kindly attempt not to extinguish the 
happy light in the amateur eye, we bite our tongue and try to find 
something nice to say -- "Hmm, well, look at those growth lines 
willya.  Good eye, good eye" --  then we're setting up the betrayal 
scene.  The amateur will go away filled with pride and expectation, only to 
discover after a while that the pro has, indeed, thrown the specimen on a 
shelf to gather dust.

Not all the fault lies with the pro, I must add.  All sorts of 
personalities can intersect with a loose fossil, and we sometimes come up 
against the CEO or the Hustler or the Needy Soul, all agog over their their 
Scientific Specimen, and feeling empowered thereby to be on the phone 
hourly with their narcissistic schemes.  No wonder field seasons are so long.

All in all, maybe the best way to handle the Eager Amateur is to give them 
directions to the library, where they can be handled by real professionals 
in this sort of thing.

At 12:43 PM 9/4/2002 -0700, Peter Roopnarinewrote:


>--  Workers sometimes are simply too busy and disorganized to pay proper 
>attention to what generally amounts to "a favour".
>--
>Dr. Peter D. Roopnarine, Chair, Asst. Curator
>Department of Invertebrate Zoology & Geology
>California Academy of Sciences
>Golden Gate Park
>San Francisco CA 94118-4599
>
>Phone: (415) 750-7085
>FAX: (415) 750-7090
>WWW: http://www.calacademy.org/research/izg/roopnarine/peter.htm
>"Description must be nonlinear, and prediction must be linear."
>Alan M. Turing
>
>
>