Higher Education Poaching

... and we're not talking about a faster way to make Eggs Benedict. It seems that poachers are still a problem all over the world. Here in the United States, while some poachers still take endangered animals, it seems a new breed of criminals are poaching fossils. Out in the grasslands of Nebraska and South Dakota are millions of square acres where dinosaur fossils are very common. There's a market for fossils, so thieves are out there looking for them. Law enforcement is a bit "limited" in trying to combat the crimes.

...a Forest Service paleontologist, Barbara Beasley, said that most fossil poachers were never caught. There is only one federal law enforcement officer patrolling 1.1 million acres of federal grasslands in Nebraska and South Dakota, which makes it easy for those with even the most elementary knowledge of archaeology to take what they want.

I wonder if she's any relation to Ron? Anyway, I digress.

Poachers include academics, those hoping to sell fossils on the black market and those who simply have their curiosity piqued by dinosaurs.

"It's like panning for gold," said Rusty Dersch, a Forest Service geologist. "The first time you find a few flakes, and you want to find a few more. It grows on you."

Dinosaur fossils also turn up by the hundreds at fossil shows, in catalogs and on Internet auction sites.

"We have researchers and academic scientists who find our permitting process difficult and just decide to go around it," Ms. Beasley said. "But a lot of them just want to sell fossils."

The sales can be lucrative. Fossilized skulls of prehistoric animals can sell for thousands of dollars. In June, a saber-toothed-cat skull sold for $32,312 at a Bonhams & Butterfields natural history auction.

So apparently this is a lot more profitable than even I would have imagined. It's a shame, but any time there's money to be made, people will fill the vacuum to make it. I would love to go on a dig like that at some point, and to be honest I didn't even know that it was illegal to dig up fossils on public land.