[meteorite-list] Re: who does what for what cause?

[Darren Garrison]

On Fri, 17 Jun 2005 23:37:45 EDT, MexicoDoug at aol.com wrote:


I don't have much to say specificly in reply to this, other than to say that I do appeciate it and
thought it to be well thought out and conciderate.  I will say that I probably would have reacted
with less anger if my original two (I felt reasonable) questions on the piece "has this been
examined by professionals and shouldn't something this important be in a museum" hadn't been replied
to with short, snide intentionally belittling replies.

I would have liked to have known where it had been examined, and by who, and how they determined it
to be a pterosaur egg, and when I could hope to see published research on the piece-- anything like
that more than a simple "yes it has", showing lack of interest in so much as sharing such
information.  Sharing this info would in no way have hurt his sale-- I wasn't asking for GPS
coordnates of the find site, after all-- I was interested in knowing about this (if it were real)
important find.  Wouldn't you think that, since he brought it up on the list, he would have been
nice enough to tell something about it, if he knew, or cared?  And his sarcastic, snide,
intentionally demeaning, and totally unnecessary "if you care so much buy it yourself and give it to
a museum" (to paraphrase) comment sealed the "ticked off" deal.

And then what I did was activly try to find out if the fossil was real, and if so, which museums I
could contact to see if they wanted to buy it.  See, I wasn't trying to take the fossil from MLB or
from the seller and deprive them of their money.  I was trying to find a buyer for them.  I WANTED
to find some professional institution willing to give him his 30 pieces of silver.  But then, in my
asking around for advice on if anyone had heard of this piece, and who I could contact about
possibly buying it, low and behold a certain Kansas fossil expert replied with the info I posted
about someone trying to show him a piece of sandstone last Saturday claiming it to be a pterodactyl
egg.  I haven't used his name on the list because I didn't ask his permission to draw him into the
issue, but if I did give his name, I'm sure most of you interested in fossils in the US would know
the name, would know the web site, and might have read his book.

Now, this may not be the same seller.  It may be a big coincidence and MLB has a real seller of a
real pterodactyl egg.  And if MLB would bother to even attempt to show that it is NOT the same egg,
I'll pubicly apologize to MLB about his real egg.  But he hasn't bothered to even attempt to address
the issue-- his replies are all more snide remarks showing how little he thinks of having some
interest other than profit motive in fossils (or possibly in ANYTHING).