Post #381079 by ikitnrev on Sun, May 18, 2008 5:45 PM

I had a similar thing happened 20 years ago, with a naturalist/fossil collector friend. We had a small group, spending a rainy/misty weekend day slowly going through a section of beach, looking for small shark tooth fossils - good sized ones were hard to find. Then a friend/seasoned collector, who volunteered at the Smithsonian, came up to the path I was searching, looked at the ground slightly ahead of where I was, and swooped down and picked up a large specimen. I was a bit irate - after all, he already had a large collection of fossils, and I was a beginner on a first-time jaunt.

That was the last time I went fossil hunting, and whenever I think of this guy, it is not as a kind, mild-hearted person (which is how I had previously thought of him) but as a guy whose act did more to turn me off to the world of fossil-collecting.

There are different types of collectors. Some people's goals are to obtain the largest collection - doing whatever it takes to obtain the most rare specimens. Others look beyong the immediate self-gratification of possession, and hope to build a community of like-minded collector friends - helping each other out, admiring each others collections, perhaps giving part of your collection as a gift, and viewing a find by one as a find for all. Sadly, I think there are more of the first kind of person than the latter.

Vern