Last night, I watched an excellent documentary, Dinosaur 13
The fun part is the beginning, when some commercial fossil hunters discover tyrannosaur bones eroding out of a hillside in South Dakota. I had some mixed feelings — those bones belong in a museum, not serving for profit! — but it’s clear that this team from the Black Hills Institute were pros, and were also skillful preparators. It’s a difficult balance, because while they are trying to make money selling specimens, it’s the nature of fossils that they really are just weathering out of the rocks, and if someone doesn’t collect them, they’ll just be lost rubble.
And Sue was an amazing find. The skeleton is 80% complete, and she was the largest of her species found to date. Peter Larson and his crew were enraptured.
Then the documentary turns grim. The law stepped in and argued that since it was found on federal land, the Black Hills Institute had no right to the specimen, and seized everything. It got tied up in an ugly legal wrangle for years. They decided that the rancher, Maurice Williams, who had let Larson dig up the skeleton for $5000 had no right to sell it either: he was leasing government land for his livestock, so it wasn’t his (apparently he hadn’t been paying for it, either).
There’s an incredible injustice. Larson is found guilty of not filling out some forms, and is given a punitive sentence of 2 years in federal prison. Sue is auctioned off for about $8 million dollars, and the money goes to…Maurice Williams? That part made no sense. It should have gone to paleontological research, if anything, not another lucky parasitic rancher who contributed nothing to the discovery.
At least Sue went to a good home, the Field Museum. And now I’m thinking that maybe this summer I’ll take a weekend drive out to the western side of South Dakota and visit the Black Hills Institute Museum.
Argh! No! Dinosaur 13 is an awful, one-sided documentary meant to play on conservative biases about the evils of big government. Larson and his crew were caught money laundering and lying on customs documents (The T .rex was just the tip of the iceberg.) The movie was based on Larson’s own book, which – needless to say – gave a less than honest version of what happened.
Here are two reviews of the movie from people who know the background details of the case:
http://www.slate.com/blogs/browbeat/2014/08/22/dinosaur_13_review_movie_about_peter_larson_spins_a_bogus_tale.html
http://phenomena.nationalgeographic.com/2014/01/21/dinosaur-13-and-the-ghost-of-tyrannosaurus-sue/
Interesting. In my country, Argentina, this would have gone differently… All fossils (and meteorites) found within our national territory are automatically considered property of the federal government, no exception, even if they’re located in private land. Their commercialization is strictly forbidden (though, of course, that doesn’t prevent some people from doing it). If the government wants to seize the fossils, there’s little you can do to stop them. On the downside, this means that some findings are never reported to save the landowners the potential trouble.
So this is the Sue that is in the main hall of the field Museum? I’ll have to watch it for more details.
I am going to use this nearly topical opportunity to shamelessly plug the Houston Museum of Natural Science (HMNS) and their new Paleontology wing. I have been through it a number of times since it opened recently and it is an awesome dino and evolution exhibit. I highly recommend it.
I don’t think Larson was as bad as you claim: they’re selling expensive fossils and traveling with lots of cash internationally, which was called “money laundering”. He was also sloppy with forms. There were genuine problems with what he was doing, but not problems worth two years in prison.
I am aware of the conflict between responsible, scientific collecting and for-profit collecting. It’s not an easy situation. There are bones eroding out of the rocks right now that will simply be lost to science altogether if someone doesn’t extract them, and we aren’t funding enough academic paleontologists to get them.
I don’t know what the solution would be. License all fossil hunters, commercial or otherwise, and require that all specimens be professionally documented, prepared, photographed, and scanned before sale? Give museums first rights to buy all fossils found on federal land at a fair price? I am sure, though, that jailing people like Larson, and taking $8 million from the Field Museum and giving it to a rancher who had nothing to do with the specimen is pretty much the wrong answer. How many academics could have been given jobs, and how many expeditions could have been funded, with that $8 million?
Kreator @ 2,
Same in Denmark, though only since 2002. Before that only cultural artefacts were the automatic property of the state not natural ones.
Doesn’t that get the timeline wrong? I thought Larson dug up the skeleton without permission, then paid Williams the money without telling him any details of what had been taken.
Even if he paid before, it’s still extremely fishy if he indeed only paid $5000 and signed the check for a “theropod”. Like Brian Switek says or implies in the 2nd article linked at #1, Williams not only may not have known what exactly it was, but may even have been deceived.
The next one will be Sue’s brother Litigate.
My problem with Dinosaur 13 is it is so one-sided in its presentation it paints an inaccurate picture of what happened. The director/producer just wanted to make a point about “government is evil” — damn the complexities of the situation. There may be a place for commercial fossil collectors, but the prices they ask for put the fossils they collect out of the reach of most museums.
If you can find it, I recommend watching the PBS Nova documentary Curse of T. rex instead. It is a much more balanced take on this same subject.
I read an article about this in Indian Country Today Media Network.com. It’s called “After T-Rex Troubles, Dinosaurs Stay on the Rez” by Christina Rose, written 3/21/14. The rancher was a Native American on the Cheyenne River Reservation and according to his widow, the $5,000.00 was for digging on their land and NOT for removing fossils. She says her husband told them it was trust land and that the government had to be involved but they took the fossils anyway.
So this story is complex and involves taking stuff off a reservation. The rancher who was finally compensated was a Native American. This is not a simple story of the government getting mad and taking revenge on some poor guy. The link to the story: indiancountrytodaymedianetwork.com/2014/03/21/after-t-rex-troubles-dinosaurs-stay-rez-154111
actually, that sounds like it would be a pretty damn fine start. Should have done this decades ago.
same for mineral collectors, for that matter.
it would help alleviate a LOT of the issues surrounding how collectors get access and distribute materials from commercial sites and public lands.
hell, it would work exactly like hunting licenses.
On the commercial side, such a regulation would add value by guaranteeing a provenance for each fossil sold.
On the academic side, as much research information as possible is recorded about the fossil for study. If future research requires access to the actual fossils, the owner of record can be approached.
I just finished watching this, and WalterW in the first comment has it exactly right.
this documentary leaves out HUGE swaths of important information, and presents it like the feds “swooped in out of nowhere and took the fossil”, which was absolute bullshit.
The Black Hills boys were approached repeatedly by scientists wanting to study the fossil, and told exactly what the problem with their claim was.
they totally left all of that discussion and debate, an entire year’s worth, btw, out of the film.
This trial DID have to happen, in fact, it should have happened decades before it finally did.
it had NOTHING to do with Sue, and the only mention of that fact made in the film was them sarcastically addressing the judge’s admonition to to mention Sue during the trial, as if it was somehow specious on the part of the judge!
so no, this was NOT a good documentary, if the purpose of a documentary is to show the actual history of an event.
what’s more, the constant bleating of “Sue confined for xxx days!!” was over the top ridiculous.
no, this trial had to happen because commercial fossil hunters were, and still are, selling EVERYONE’S legacy to the highest fucking bidder, and these guys were no exception.
The land is only “federal” in a sense. It’s actually Indian land. After white people bargained for some land, swindled some more, and waged war to take nearly all the rest, the land that was “reserved” for first nations people in the US was denied by the US to be the property of the actual people who lived on the land.
The US government decided that neither the nations for whom the land was reserved nor the individuals living on it could ever “own” the land – not in the sense that white people do and did. The individuals could not take out mortgages on the land, could not sell the land – to each other, to individuals of other federally recognized tribes, to white people, or to anyone else.
The feds used the concept of trust (“X [the trustee] owns property Y, but only for the benefit of Z [the beneficiary]”) to strip rights – important property rights! – from the members of federally recognized tribes. Worse, under the Dawes Act and later legislation, reservation land was assigned to individual beneficiaries. The goal stated (though it’s doubtful the government was ever serious about it beyond the rhetorical cover it provided) was to “accustom” the savage Indians who held everything in common to the noble, civilized system of private property. It is clear from the historical record, however, that one major (if not the major) goal was not made part of the public declaration of legislative purpose: the US government intended to keep the land divided to make collective action more difficult (the nations themselves couldn’t mortgage a very large hunk of land to begin projects that might have far reaching effects – including economic independence – but that were capital-intensive to undertake. Projects specifically to be prevented were tribal enterprises to extract mineral wealth from their own lands. The nations were to be kept too poor to undertake such extraction, and the feds would then lease mining rights to the land (the land that was never supposed to belong to the federal government) to 3rd party (white) mining companies, who would then profit from the mineral rights, taking money from nations yet again!
The US government also sought, through individual allotment, to attempt to create different interests that would cause intra-community hostility (the land given to a nation was then split up by white employees of the federal government, with individuals having a right to different pieces of land, which, given the nature of land and the size of at least some of the reservations, had different levels of mineral wealth on different patches of land. Thus some rights-holders (even though they weren’t land-owners) would be differently affected by mining than others.
However, when one holds something in trust for someone, the benefits really are supposed to go to that person (or group) who constitute the assigned beneficiary. Under the Dawes Act, related legislation, and requirements of trusteeship the money paid by the 3rd parties was supposed to be
1) merely passing through the US federal government to the rights-holders
2) a fair-market value royalty.
The problems were numerous, not least that
1) the government never passed the money on,
2) it went into the US general treasury and was spent intermixed with tax revenues, tariff revenues, and so on, with no provisions for separate accounting
3) thus, it was just fucking spent – gone, poof!
4) thus according to the law’s one concession to honestly avoiding being a naked theft – that any money the federal government collected had to be returned to the tribe-member assigned that land – the US had stolen the money and was in clear violation of the law, not to mention,
5) the US never kept any records for how the mineral extraction was valued from separate plot to separate plot. The US was trying to teach the savage indian about the noble value of private property, but the US treated the parcels of land as entirely undifferentiated – not only on a particular reservation, but they failed (in many but not all cases) to keep records that would distinguish between one reservation and anther, the land of one nation from the land of an entirely separate nation.
6) Thus after 110 years of the federal government selling of the mineral and other extraction rights to land supposedly individually assigned to people other than the federal government, a few rights-holders filed suit mentioning that the federal government was 109 years and 9 months behind on their quarterly payments and asked, pretty-please could we just look at the accounting statements that the Interior Department is required by law to keep for each individual parcel of land? We’d very much like to see for ourselves these public records – which we have a right to review – in order to make sure the ongoing payments of $0.00 are, in fact, correct.
7) Thus the federal government said: Look, sorry, we don’t have that information, we can’t get that information, that information doesn’t exist because that law we wrote to make it look like the white folk weren’t engaged in a naked attempt to fuck your community even harder, to create infighting, and to steal you blind – that law? – well, it was just a smokescreen we put up while fucking your community, creating infighting and stealing you blind.
8) Thus the Feds lost badly in court at every step, but deliberately delayed to the point of the most outrageous lawlessness short of the original governmental misconduct that started the whole affair.
9) Thus the court ordered the Feds to get their act together and, where any records existed, to pass the moneys on to the rights-holders for the properties from which anything of value was extracted, and, oh, by the way, maybe figure out what you’re going to do about all the money owed to rights-holders and their descendants since you didn’t pay them at the time and don’t really know how much you owe.
PZ I love a lot of what you write, but this person isn’t a “parasite”. Maurice Williams is a man whose whole family has been fucked out rights that you take for granted, and fucked out of those rights for 129 years now. The federal government set up the law where it was actually illegal for Williams to sell or lease extraction rights to his own land. In exchange, the federal government promised to return every single penny it collected to some ancestor-or-other of Williams (and, later, to Williams himself). The federal government refused to abide by the one-sided agreement it negotiated with itself. When Williams, alone among the tribal rights-holders specifically because the federal government had sliced up communal lands to the detriment of his nation, held beneficial trust to the land that later yielded Sue, given that the government was already facing horrific Contempt problems for failing to follow court orders in the suit asking to look at the individual accounting statements for land parcels (ultimately known as Cobell v Salazar), a suit 10 years old at the time, the government had no choice but to pay every penny it collected from the auction of Sue to the man whose family had been screwed out of their property rights for 120 years. There actually was an easy money trail in that case, and woe betide the Feds if, after being taken behind the woodshed for 110 years of dishonesty and then trying to claim since records of the thefts don’t exist, why worry about paying anybody back for what was stolen?, they then tried to claim that even when they did have the records, they were going to flout the law to fuck beneficiaries like Maurice Williams one more time.
Calling this man a parasite was a bad, bad move.
To be clear, certain aspects of the original Dawes conditions on land trusts were changed (again, unilaterally by the Feds) to create some ability to transfer land between members of federally recognized tribes – and I think to others under certain conditions, but I really don’t know much about that. I was referring here to the original Dawes conditions on land trusts, but the fundamental facts that are necessary to understanding this situation remained true: 1) ownership was denied and 2) the US government kept control of any dealings for certain rights – notably including mineral and extraction rights, for 3) the purpose of dividing and destabilizing communities, with 4) the only significant responsibility the US had was to make sure that monies the Feds took from deals for those rights it controlled were a) market-fair, and b) passed on to individual rights-holders directly and in full without administrative fees or other debits, and 5) that it not only shirked this responsibility shamelessly, it always intended to give the financial benefits of Trust Lands to 3rd parties and not the actual beneficiaries of the trust, so sure they 6) did, in fact, give the benefits only to 3rd parties and not to beneficiaries for 120 years when 7) they were forced by courts to actually obey the law.
I woke up too early and I am feeling surly, so:
@5
[pedant] The word “artefact” or artifact, as we say here in the US, comes from two Latin words meaning “to make”. An artefact is by definition something that was made. Meteorites, fossils, etc. are not artifacts.
[/pedant]
That said, I like the idea of government controlling such things as long as there are some serious regulations about who gets to play with them.
PZ, walterw, Ichthyic, and Crip Dyke, thanks for the enlightening discussion. Echo chamber, my eye; this is why I like coming to Pharyngula.
Well, the obvious solution would be better funding for academic paleontology, as well as partnerships with volunteer organizations. These organizations allow the public to get involved in paleontology, handle fossils, and work with professional paleontologists, and the fossils excavated end up in museums.
We lived in Rapid City SD from 1992 to 1995. We are friends with one of the Black Hills Institute employees interviewed in the film (Marion Zenker). We knew Marion through our involvement with the Black Hills Unitarian Universalist Fellowship.
Marion wasn’t involved with fossil collection — she was an office worker for the Black Hills Institute. Even so, she was out thousands of dollars in legal fees due to this case.
The funny incident that I remember from this case was federal law enforcement investigators thinking that Marion was some kind of wily hardware hacker that caused the Black Hill Institute computer records to auto-destruct.
The Black Hills Institute was a Macintosh shop and early 1990s Macs uses SCSI for external storage. The feds came in and seized all of their records including computer records. Their computer investigator plugged a SCSI device into a PC-compatible printer port (Macs used the DB-25 port for SCSI — the same port was used on PCs for parallel printer ports).
This fried the external hard drive and the feds thought Marion was responsible for this “sabotage” caused by their lack of Macintosh knowledge.