Haven't drawn 2D art in a while. Bristolia insolens from the Lower Cambrian 520 million years ago😊

UGH Yes, thank you, Reid. If you wanna keep a souvenir of a Backyard Find, get a photo of yourself handing it over to a descendant community, university researcher or museum.

@chaotic-archaeologist is like..

With an emphasis on

with the cultural descendants

Listen, I’m not sure why this person decided to put this in the tags for this post, but I want to make this a teaching moment, not a callout.

I understand that it’s difficult to fully comprehend why keeping stuff that you find is harmful. Let’s look at a case study:

This article is about the Cerberus Collection, which is comprised of many many artifacts that were recovered from private home collections after people had taken them illegally from sites in the American Southwest. They were seized during an FBI sting operation, and there were severe legal repercussions for those involved.

The Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) requires that human remains and artifact associated with human remains be returned to descendant Indigenous communities. The artifacts that were being kept in these peoples’ homes did not belong to them, and their display was both disrespectful and illegal.

Beyond the legal penalties, there’s also the ethics of the situation. Many of these artifacts are grave goods associated with the burials of Indigenous people from the past. Looting these artifacts is an act of grave desecration and deep disrespect for the dead. It is also harmful to current Indigenous groups, who have stated over and over again that they want these graves and sacred sites to remain undisturbed, and that artifacts that are found returned to them for respectful reburial.

Even if whatever you found doesn’t come from an Indigenous or otherwise marginalized group, it’s still unethical to keep them for yourself. We do not own the past, and keeping artifacts in private collections prevents everyone else from learning about and sharing knowledge of the past. This is exactly why the UK created the 1996 Treasure Act. Many other countries have similar legislation. Keeping things that you find can have legal consequences.

TL;DR keeping artifacts that you find is unethical and potentially illegal. The needs of descendant communities must be addressed. No one has a singular claim to the past and everyone should be able to benefit from the material culture of the past.

If you find something cool it is totally understandable to want a memento of that find, but that can’t be keeping the thing! Here’s some other options, but always check with a professional on what may or may not be appropriate for your particular find:

An important thing to understand about archaeological finds is, if you as an untrained individual take anything you are effectively destroying 99% or more of its value.

See, the big thing is context. It’s not “Woo! Gold coins!”

It’s about Where the artifacts were found. With, well, absolute precision. Are they in layers? Were there any fibers between them? What’s on top of what other thing?

For example, in the Cahokia dig, there were some VERY ELABORATE graves. But… those graves we made mostly using woven fibers, wood, and other degradable materials. If you just dug them up, you’d get some Chunkey discs and bones. A formal archaeological dig, however, was able to determine that there was a very involved funerary process, that certain of the bodies were closely related, while others were not, and the different ways those were handled. This gives us a valuable window on the politics and practices of a culture which did not leave any written records. And, of course, the remains could be handled in accordance with NAGPRA.

In the museum where I volunteer, most of the artifacts I’ve cleaned have no monetary value at all. The only reason we care about them is because we know exactly where they were found. Without that information they’re just trash.

While it doesn’t hold the same precious cultural weight as archaeology, the same goes for palaeontology. A fossil belongs in a place where it can be guaranteed to be preserved and always be accessible to study. The place is not in your home, nor is it in the home of the kind of wealthy scum who buy up impressive specimens and deliberately keep them out of the hands of science. 

Scientific findings must always be verifiable and repeatable, and this is not the case when a fossil is held in a private collection that the owner could refuse access to at any time. This is partly why the purchase of STAN the T. rex was such a big deal, the buyer has not revealed themselves and has not made the specimen available for study. This means that all research done on STAN in the past is not no longer repeatable and testable, which is a massive blow because studies on STAN have given us so much information on tyrannosaur biology.

If you ever find a fossil out in the wild, DO NOT ATTEMPT TO EXCAVATE IT YOURSELF. You have no idea how much data needs to be collected from the bones, from the soil and rock around the bone, from the landscape and stratigraphy and weather conditions. Contact a museum and follow their directions, take steps to protect the fossil such as with a tarpaulin if there’s a risk the fossil could be damaged by weather before experts can look at it, but please DO NOT touch the fossil. Your find will have so much more value if people who know their stuff can get everything they need from it.

I also strongly advise against buying fossils, even small ones. To be fully transparent, I myself own several small fossils that I bought when I was a kid, and did not understand the ethical issues of the fossil trade or privately held fossils. Those fossils that I do have are now basically scientifically useless because they cannot be traced back to their source location, and it hurts to know that. The fossil trade is full of unethical practices, dangerous working conditions, forced and unpaid labour, illegal smuggling of fossils across borders, destruction of natural landscapes, and destruction of fossils themselves. It is an industry that needs to go extinct, and it is not worth your support in exchange for a pretty trilobite on your shelf.

Fossils are also always the property of the indigenous owners of the lands where the fossil was found. Smuggling is rampant in the fossil trade, and there have been several recent high-profile cases such as the holotype of Ubirajara that was stolen from Brazil, or the Tarbosaurus skeleton that was returned to Mongolia after it was revealed to have been illegally smuggled, leading to the repatriation of many other stolen Mongolian fossils. The sale and private ownership of fossils violates the rights of indigenous people to own the fossils found on their land, and this is something that palaeontology as a field has only just begun to reckon with. 

It’s an infuriating truth that so many fossils studied around the world are stolen from their rightful owners. Though they are not human remains or artefacts they still carry important cultural weight, and their fates must be decided by their true owners. Palaeontology is a field built off the back of colonialism and theft, and there is a lot of difficult work that needs to be done to decouple it from that legacy.

The windows 95 screensaver I needed

Two kinds of people:

People who took the news of feathered dinosaurs like this:

And those who took it like this:

I hate it when people say “science ruined dinosaurs” as though dinosaurs are just some pop culture monster invention and not real things that existed and that we are continuing to make new discoveries about

Amen

Listen I don’t care if you think feathers on a dinosaur look stupid if a 9 ton apex predator is coming at you at 25 mph, you’re not going to laugh at its feathers. YOU’RE GOING TO HAUL ASS

Most of y’all are afraid of geese and they have feathers.

Imagine a 9 ton goose that’s about to fuck your shit up.

i don’t have to imagine that i live next to lake ontario 

emus won the war

big bones don’t lie - griffins

[If you found my blog because you’re curious about Greek people mixing up prehistoric bears and demigods, this post is for you. I studied archaeology with a focus on other things, and the research on this topic goes back decades, but imo the best book on how dinosaur bones influenced mythology is Adrienne Mayor’s The First Fossil Hunters. I strongly suggest you support this amazing historian and buy her stuff - she’s a great writer and she specializes in folklore and geomythology, it doesn’t get much cooler than that - but if you can’t and you’re interested in the subject - well, I believe scientific knowledge should be shared and accessible to everyone, so here are a few highlights. Part one of six.] 

Griffins: a very mysterious mystery

“A race of four-footed birds, almost as large as wolves and with legs and claws like lions.” 

The one thing you need to know about griffins is that they don’t really fit in anywhere. They have no powers, they don’t help heroes, they’re not defeating gods or anything like that. Technically speaking, they’re not even monsters - people thought griffins were legit - real animals who lived in Central Asia and sat on golden eggs and mostly killed anyone who went near them. And okay, someone might say, ‘Frog, what’s fishy about that? People used to be dumb as rocks and there’s plenty of bizarro animals out there, anyway’ and yeah, that’s a very good point - except for one thing. See, what’s creepy about griffins is that we’ve got drawings and descriptions of them spanning ten centuries and thousands of miles, and yet they always. look. the. freaking. same. 

Like, here’s how people imagined elephants.

This is insanely funny and probably why God sent the Black Death to kill everyone, but also pretty common tbh, because a) people want to feel involved, b) people are liars who lie and c) it’s hard to imagine stuff you’ve never seen. So the more a story is passed around, the more it’s going to gain and lose details here and there, until you get from dog-footed hairy monkey of doom to plunger-nosed horror on stilts. But griffins - art or books, they’re consistently described as wolves-sized mammals with a beaked face. So that’s what made Adrienne Mayor go, Uh. 

And what she did next is she started digging around in Central Asia, because that’s the other thing everyone agreed on: that griffins definitely lived there and definitely came from there. And this is where things get really interesting, because as it turns out, on one side of the Urals you’ve got Greeks going, ‘Mate, the Scythians, you know - they’ve got these huge-ass lion birds, I’m not even shitting you rn’ while on the other side of the Urals - wow and amaze - you’ve got Siberian tribes singing songs about the ‘bird-monsters’ and how their ancestors slaughtered them all because they were Valiant and Good.

(This according to a guy studying Siberian traditions in the early 1800s, anyway, because you know who writes stuff down? Not nomads, bless them: dragging around a shitload of books on fucking horseback is not a kind of life anyone deserve to live.)

And anyway, do you know what else those Mighty Ancestors did? They mined gold sand, and they kept tripping over dinosaur bones because that entire area is full of both things and some places are lucky like that. And in fact, the more excavations were carried out in ancient Scythian settlements, the more we started to realize that those guys were even more obsessed with griffins than the Greek were. Hell, some warriors even had griffins tattooed on their bodies? 

And it’s probably all they ever talked about, because that’s when griffins suddenly appear in the Mediterreanean landscape: when Greek people start trading (and talking) with the Scythians.

(Another important note here, not that I’m not bitter or anything: something else those excavations are showing is that Herodotus was fucking right about fucking everything, SO THERE. Father of lies my ass, he was the only sensible guy in that whole bean-avoiding, monster-fucking, psychopathic and self-important Greek ‘intelligentsia’ and they can all fuck off and die and we don’t care about temples Pausy you dumb bitch we want to hear about the tree people and the Amazons and the fucking griffins goddammit. Uuugh. /rant)

So anyway, Scythian nomads had been hunting for gold in places with exciting names like ‘the field of the white bones’ and basically dying of exposure because mountains, so Herodotus (and others) got this right as well: that successful campaigns could take a long-ass time, and very often people just disappeared, never to be heard from again. What everybody got less right: the nomads and adventurers and gold miners weren’t killed by griffins, because by the time they started traveling into those mountains, ‘griffins’ had been dead for hundreds of thousands of years. What they did see, and what was sure to spook the fuck out of them, were fossils - and, more precisely, protoceratops skulls, which can be found on all the major caravan routes from China all the way to Uzbekistan and are so ubiquitous paleontologists call them ‘a damn nuisance’.

And guess what they look like.

Just fucking guess.

[Left: a golden griffin, Saka-Scyhtian culture; right: psittacosaurus skull, commonly found in Uzbekistan and the western Gobi.]

Also, fun detail if you’re into gory and painful ways of dying: many of the dino skeletons are found standing up, because the animals would be caught in sand storms and drop dead. So basically you’d be riding your horse and minding your own gold-related business when all of a sudden you see the empty sockets of a beaked something staring at you and yeah - as a reminder, the idea of evolution was not a thing until Darwin, so any Scythian or Siberian tribesman seeing something like that would assume there was a fairly good fucking chance of a live whatever-the-hell-this-is waiting for him behind the next hill. And that’s what he’d say to Greek traders over a bowl of fermented mare’s milk: to stay the fuck away from those mountains, because griffins, man, they’re fucking real and there’s hundreds of them and anyway, maybe write that down if writing’s something you’re into, never saw the point myself but eh, to each his own, right, and cheers, good health, peace and joy to the ancestors. 

Man, don’t you just love mythology?

(How fossils influenced mythology: part two, Cyclops, will be up soon.) 

I visited the museum and I heard two bros in the dinosaur exhibit having an earnest discussion about the best way to kill a T-Rex with a sword and what kind of armour should be worn into the battle and they spoke with such passion I really wish the scientific community could have heard them. I’d love to know how palaeontologists would weigh in on The Great Debate.

For instance, was the bro in the weed shorts right? Is it pointless to wear heavy armour when battling a T-Rex? Is it truly better to go into battle naked wielding dual swords? Or was the bro in the backwards cap correct? Should you go for a double-handed sword and iron armour? Will light bouncing off the armour really confuse and blind the beast? Realistically, what protection is armour against a dinosaur? Was Weed Shorts right when he proposed to use his superior agility to slash its tendons and stab the eyes when he brought it down? Or was Backwards Cap right when he said charge and slash open its soft belly?? What is the truth??!??

Hello, palaeontologist-in-training here! Thought I’d have a little think into this because hey, who wants to do coursework on trilobites when you could be considering T. rex instead?

Figures 1 & 2: Theoretical T. rex bite-force model fucking up a mini. Thank you, Bill Oddie and BBC’s The Truth About Killer Dinosaurs.

As far as armour goes, lighter is better, and at the end of the day isn’t going to mean shit anyway. T. rex can’t slash at you with claws, so it’s bite or bust, and if it bites YOU’RE bust. So, lets say a point to Weed Shorts. Why NOT fight a T. rex butt naked with swords.

So, using light to blind and confuse the rex? May potentially work but might be hard and wouldn’t do much for long. Don’t rely on this for strategy.

Figure 3: The gastralia of a T. rex. Bless u Scott Hartman for your skeletal references.

As far as attack goes, the belly is not as weak a spot as it seems. So, point to Weed Shorts on his execution plan. Sounds pretty solid.

Overall, I’d say that Weed Shorts had the best plan to defeat the mighty Tyrannosaurus rex. If you ever see him again, congratulate him on his solid plan of attack.

My favorite thing about paleontologists (and any scientist really, but paleontologists in particular) is that you can ask them COMPLETELY BATSHIT INSANE questions and by God, they will give you a completely Serious answer. Also @assassinahsoka this reminds me of your guy who wanted to eat a t rex.