For years, she has offered important specimens to the Smithsonian Institution and other top museums at bargain rates, or sometimes donated them. A dazzling ammonite from Morocco might bring hundreds. Paleontologists are outraged by fossil speculating. Thieves, they say, can ruin years of careful excavation in overnight raids. Many specimens are poached from public lands.
Poachers are out there in greater numbers now.
They will take fossils regardless of the risk. However, she points out, paleontology has relied on amateurs for nearly two centuries. After the Civil War, rival paleontologists Edward Drinker Cope and Othniel Charles Marsh conducted a dinosaur version of the gold rush across the American West, employing amateurs who used picks, shovels and even dynamite. I spend all my time in the field. They might dig something every few years when they get funding.