Friday, March 13, 2009

Vertebrate Fossils in the U.S.

All:

I am a member of the Association of Applied Paleontological Sciences, and I am hoping to find support amoung the readers of this blog for help in defeating or removing a provision that was wedged into the recent Omnibus Land Management Act of 2009 in front of Congress. Please read on:

As you may have heard, the Omnibus Land Management Act 2009 was defeated in the House on Wednesday. This act is not part of the stimulus program, nor is it a spending bill. It will adversely affect those of us who hunt, collect, trade and sell vertebrate fossils outside of an academic setting. Just because the House of Representatives defeated it for now, our work is far from over. It will be presented again, as early as next week, and it is imperative that we contact those Representatives that voted Yes and inform them of the big problems with the Paleontological Resources Preservation Act (PRPA), a very small part of this 1000+ page bill. I'm pretty confident that most of the folks in Congress have not read this entire bill and are voting based on the small part of it they want to see passed. That's no excuse and we need to help them be responsible stewards of our country. Tracie Bennitt of Triebold Paleontology, Inc. was personally able to change the vote of her representative in Colorado, Doug Lamborn, by showing him the problems with this bill. Please take action NOW and contact your representative. Here are some talking points for your call, fax, email or letter.
S22 Subtitle D (page 495 of 1248) PRPA Highlights:
The bill requires a federal permit for fossil collecting on federal lands; there is NO exception for casual collectors and permit is still required, and without one a casual collector will be subject to the penalties outlined below:
It requires that ALL vertebrate fossils found on federal lands are the property of the U.S. Government.
Establishes civil and criminal penalties for some fossil activities that are quite commonplace. Local boy scouts and college students could be arrested.
The criminal penalties are felonies in some situations. Child abusers and rapists get off easier than this! And for picking up a fossil?
The federal government is given the powers of asset forfeiture for vehicles, equipment, and fossils collected in violations of these new restrictions.
The bill also contains a provision to condemn private land with funds seized under this act. Your personal property could be taken if the government thinks it's in their best interest! (See United States Code Chapter 44 Title 18) This is in the gray area and we all know how the government can operate in the gray.
Locality data will not be released. This is against all scientific principles of sharing knowledge.
There are still no provisions for the sale of fossils by commercial dealers. You can grind them up into gravel, but not collect and sell them. There has never been an opportunity for commercial collectors to come to the table to present reasonable alternatives for collecting, although the Secretary of the Interior instructed all interested parties, academic, amateur, professional and government to sit down and map this out.
The direct effect of PRPA will be to exclude the majority of those who are currently collecting fossils on federal lands from being able to do so. This will reduce the fossils available for museums and classrooms. The vast majority of amateurs are not operating for profit. Those of us that are will continue to be unable to collect on federal lands. You can get a permit for just about anything else, forest products, wildlife, gas and oil, timber harvest, mining etc. but not to collect fossils. One can even get a permit to go onto federal lands (= public lands) to dig up rocks and crush them into gravel for profit The academic community cannot collect them all and would rather see them turn to dust than show up in a private collection or pay fair market value for someone else collecting it.
So, I urge you to act today. We did make a difference on this vote, but next time round they only need half to pass. Please help.
Now is the time to write your local federal representatives, and let them know where you stand on the bill. Most congressmen have a toll free number listed in your phone book, and on their web sites.

Thanks to Tracie Bennitt of Triebold Paleontology, Inc. for preparring the bulk of this posting. I hope you will help in this endeavour and contact your representatives. If you do so by e-mail please c.c. (or b.c.) me at jfk@hms-beagle.com.

==JFK==
member AAPS


Wednesday, March 4, 2009

EuroTool lapidary & jewelry working tools

By the time you read this post we will be awaiting our first shipment of EuroTool tools and equipment for lapidarists, jewelers and hobbyists. This will be another line from a local, Kansas City area, company, and they join Garmin, Donnegan, Ken-a-Vision, and Midland Radio as the lines we carry that are made in our area.

Very soon now these new items wil be on our shelves and in our on-line catalog.

==JFK==

Correcting an error...

This past Saturday we had the last monthly session for our Science Club members in the 4th through 8th grade on Charles Darwin. During that session I misspoke and created an error that, I am sure. led to a misunderstanding of my point about relatedness among species. My point was intended to be about the well-known cichlid fishes (Family: Cichlidae) of Lake Victoria in East Africa. Prior to the 1980's there were known to be several hundred species of small, mostly in-shore cichlids in the lake. By that time, however, the introduction of the Nile perch (Lates niloticus) had started to take a noticeable toll on the endemic fishes and their total numbers as well as the number of species began to drastically disappear.

This kicked in high gear a world-wide effort to stop the species loss, and the Victorial Species Survival Plan (VSSP) was instituted whereby zoos and aquariums and private individuals were to hold in captivity, for the purposes of captive breeding, select species whose offspring would them be reintroduced into the lake.

Studies of the genetics of a group of fourteen, obviously distinct, species of these colorful fishes led to the discovery that there were fewer genetic differents among those fourteen species than there were (are) between any two individual humans, and all humans are of the same species!

My error came about when I substituted the word more for the word fewer.

==JFK==