A case of stolen Scottish fossils
31 October 2000. Silurian fish and invertebrate fossils from Scotland are stolen from a protected site, and sold to a museum in Germany. Scottish Natural Heritage are alerted in February 2001 after an academic reports seeing the 430-million-year-old remains in a museum in Berlin.
A team of Scottish Natural Heritage geologists decided to visit the Humboldt University Museum in Berlin, to discuss the possible return of the rare fossils. Jamoytius kerwoodi, an anaspid (one of the eel-like jawless fishes), has only been found on a river bank in Lanarkshire, which has been designated a Site of Special Scientific Interest. This site may have been raided several times by a foreign collector who knew what he was looking for.
Several well-preserved fossils of Ainiktozoon, a proto-chordate (related to the first creatures with a backbone), were destroyed in the collecting raid. The well-preserved, complete fossils of Jamoytius, each about 16 cm long, are worth about £10 000. There are believed to be only about 150 Ainiktozoon loganese fossils in the world, all of which come from the one site in Scotland. Colin MacFadyen, the geologist leading the delegation, accepted that the German museum had bought the fossils in good faith, but he thought it was important to establish that the remains had been obtained without permission of the landowner and without a licence.
As our plane departed Heathrow, en route for Germany, I wondered just what we were getting ourselves involved in. Would Germany provide us with the clues we needed to crack the case, or would it prove to be a dangerous place for people like us snooping around asking questions about stolen fossils? I had read a lot of articles about stolen or illegally exported fossils turning up in German shops, or being confiscated from German dealers, so it seemed to me to be a good place for us to try to trace the path of a valuable stolen fossil, or at least to uncover information about possible end destinations of black-market fossils.
Post a comment