Help preserve the Sharktooth Hill Bonebed

Hey Folks,

This web page was posted several months ago, but to anyone who is interested, the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County is trying to raise money to purchase the Sharktooth Hill locality for posterity.

To those unaware, the venerated Bob Ernst (who formerly owned the property) passed away several years ago. Unbeknownst to many, the vast collections at the Buena Vista Museum of Natural History made from Sharktooth Hill were not an actual museum collection, but Ernst's private collection on display, and passed on to his widow. When she began having financial problems, she began to sell and auction off the collection, including many specimens which have now been published in peer-reviewed articles (a big, big, BIG screw up on the part of certain researchers). This is really bad, because unless these specimens are donated to collections of real museums - that work is effectively rendered untestable.

That being said, here is the page, posted by Don Prothero and Teresa LaVelle:

http://www.skeptic.com/eskeptic/11-05-11/

A personal tour of the Sharktooth Hill locality will be given by the museum director, John Long, for donations of over 2000$.

Unfortunately, I'm still relatively poor, as a student, and anything I could scrounge together would barely amount to a drop in the bucket - however, I can help out by posting it here, and hoping that this message can get spread a little further. This is probably the most spectacular marine vertebrate fossil site in western North America, and so many problems could be solved for Mrs. Ernst and marine mammal paleontologists if this money were raised.