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  • 4 hours ago
Discover why natural history museums often can't afford to buy dinosaur skeletons and rely on donations from wealthy collectors. The discussion explores the legal frameworks in the US and UK that treat fossils like mineral rights, contrasting with nations that protect them as cultural heritage.
Transcript
00:00fossils are regularly sold for millions of dollars but they're also regularly donated to
00:05natural history museums because they don't budget for acquisitions unlike art museums obviously they
00:11can't compete with billionaires and bankers but a lot of those billionaires and bankers do loan or
00:17donate these specimens to big natural history museums and also this is also a failure of
00:23of u.s and british law to be honest rather than the consumer because in the u.s and the
00:28uk the law
00:30treats dinosaur fossils more like a sort of mineral rights so there are commercial prospectors in the
00:34u.s whereas a lot of countries where there are a lot of dinosaur fossils like china mongolia brazil
00:40argentina they treat dinosaur fossils as cultural heritage and don't allow them to be exported
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