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Filched Fish Fossils
By Huw Williams
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Fossil experts in Scotland have condemned a German museum, which - they say - is refusing to give up a collection of unique fossil fish taken illegally from a site in South Lanarkshire. Geologists who've examined the site say it's been so badly damaged by irresponsible private collectors that there are no fossils left.
The area affected is the Birk Knowes Site of Special Scientific Interest, just a few miles from Lesmahagow in South Lanarkshire. 430 million years ago it was covered by an inland sea, teeming with primitive fish. They are the first known vertebrates on earth, and their fossilised remains have only ever been discovered here. That's attracted illegal collectors, prepared to use explosives, heavy equipment, hammers and chisels to extract specimens they either keep, or sell on.
Dr Colin MacFadyen, from Scottish Natural Heritage (SNH), which manages the site, showed me marks in the rock that clearly prove irresponsible fossil hunters have been here recently.
At the National Museums of Scotland in Edinburgh, the curator of rocks, Dr Suzanne Miller told me she wasn't suprised by that. She's just completed an assessment of the damage caused by collectors at Birk Knowes - and her verdict is a bleak one.
"There are no fossils remaining", she says. "It's a tiny pocket of some rocks that are over 400 million years old, and everything has gone."
The extraordinary thing is that some fossils that can only have come from this site have ended up in the Humboldt Museum of Natural History in Berlin. They were taken without permission from the landowner and without a permit from the conservation bodies in charge of protecting the site. But the museum's director, Professor Hans-Peter Schultze, says he bought them in good faith from a private collector.
He says there was a legal case against the collector, but it was declined. And anyway, he adds, "he had offered the collection to Scottish Natural Heritage, but maybe his price was too high. He wanted his expenses for 20 years of making trips to Scotland".
Not suprisingly, SNH's version of events is different. It says it didn't go ahead with legal action because the European legislation has never been tested in the courts, and the case would have been prohibitively expensive. And, it says, it couldn't negotiate to buy the collection, because the fossils were - in effect - stolen goods.
Professor Schultze, from the Humboldt, insists there was nothing wrong with what the collector did. He says: "it was legal, at least in the beginning of the 70s, and in the 80s. In addition, you can go and collect there again. That's not a problem."
But Dr Suzanne Miller says that's exactly the point, you can't go and collect at Birk Knowes any more because the fossils, and the priceless information about what specimens were found in which strata of rock, have all gone.
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Colin McFadyen:
says the fossils should
return to Scotland
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Dr Suzanne Miller:
says that none of the
unique fossils are left
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National Museums of Scotland in Edinburgh
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