A more serious look at fossil collecting
Another rather dramatic title and much more sinister. It is true lives are lost all over the world in the pursuit of fossil collecting from inter-tidal collecting or rock falls on the coasts of Britain and to the far reaches world.
My own experience is meeting fellow fossikers working in the deserts of Morocco and then by the time of the next expedition being those fellows being absent from the digs or hearing of news, how a cave or roof fall buried the poor chap.
Having been in the vanadanite mines and smashing my head against the rough and sharp outcrops it’s all to easy to see how less serious accidents happen, many a random blow to the head or hand in the suspected discovery of some new find have plagued me over the years, as I‘m sure it’s the same for many a fossiker.
Standing in the middle of a flat desert-landscape some years ago I was incredulous and for once lost for words, when I first glimpsed a wizen old man sat crossed legged in a tunnel beneath two metres beneath my feet, grasping in his tough aged hands a battered looking pic, with every blow to the side of the burrowed out tunnel, the consequential shudder sent the congealed sandy matrix that entombed him ‘almost’ , falling in clouds of fine dust to the tunnel floor.
I went down to his level on all fours to experience just what this chap suffered to excavate these loved trilobite fossils. As soon as he commenced the blow and it had the consequence to make the world seem as thought it were in the act of an earth quake tremor I hightailed it out of that pit, not wanting to experience the second or subsequent blows, as his brown stained and infrequent teeth framed by a white rambling moustache and scruffy forest of a beard grinned and chuckled after my heels scampering up a screed of pebbles and loose sand. I only saw the old man of the desert that one time, I didn’t want to go back there again in case the worst I feared might have taken place.
I sort of grew attached, in the brief time we spent together above and below terra firma. ironically he took exception and more trouble over my filming him work, least it should bring him bad Karma and his fossils dry up.
Life is hard in these places, money - hard currency, has such importance. Of course no one works to die, we work to live, being preferable..
I don’t want to sound flippant saying that. Even in Europe we risk our souls sometimes. A colleague told once of being in his domain, a part of the coast he knew well for years of collecting, an experienced climber and beachcomber. Yet one hunting trip nearly proved his undoing, on an incoming tide at the cliff base a uncommon rock fall laid him unconscious for a time, his dog licking his face as he came round just in the nick of time to make a gingerly trod way back up to the safety of the cliff top, with severe head trauma which took weeks to fully recover from.
The old man of the desert was in the eastern part of southern Morocco, digging near Alnif, Taouz region, often described as a seemingly barren place. However the beauty is enormously evident when you become accustomed to the desert scene. As the sun rises all life becomes apparent until the sun warms the reminiscent - Luna, rock strewn desert floor, beyond comfort.
Farther north in a village near Goulmima a man worked in a cave working out fossils from the cretaceous ocean layers, Mosasaurs, Fishes and Ammonites, I arrived a few weeks after his family lost him to a cave fall, tragic yet not uncommon in this industry in Morocco.
This is not the publicity which really does our industry any good at all. It doesn’t make the fossils rarer or more important it only serves to highlight the dangers and unnecessary risks some keen collectors push themselves to, or for some to eek out a living in this apparently lucrative trade rather than a more mundane and less financially rewarding career.
The fossils industry in morocco has grown
exponentially
over the last 35 years and has many disapprovers [many out of Morocco of course] as well as supporters.
In other reports people have been severely injured and killed around the phosphate mines where dynamite blasting of the enormous open cast mine faces of rock have trapped fossikers under these monumental blast’s, if not quick enough to scramble away from collecting in the loose aggregate, at the upper or lower face when the alarm is sounded before detonation.
In the high anti Atlas regions collecting ammonites, scorpions and snake bites cause continual problems and it has been reported that fossil hunters, particularly of a younger age have been fatally poisoned by these venomous creatures.
The antidote cannot be kept outside of a fridge for any length of time and not many of those when rambling miles over the Anti Atlas.
looking back writing here, many years ago, maybe 18 years now, when scrambling over a high peak shortly after sunrise and overlooking a dammed lake in the south of Morocco, I turned over a rock, a scorpion scuttled away as a lovely Silurian trilobite appeared on the underside of the rock.
Fortunately I have been lucky and not experienced yet the sting of a scorpion.
However coming close more than a few times, the last experience of a near miss when on expedition recently, and this in the safe environment of a colleagues store near Casablanca, turning over flat boxes looking through stock a very large black ‘king’ of scorpions half jumped at me and scurried over the flat box I had just lifted to chest height, freezing at this impertinence, my companions jumped into action and the beast was quickly flicked away and flattened with a rather large shovel, which now on reflection may well have been employed in this way previously, with such practiced skill the whole operation was carried out by my Moroccan companion. My European fellows accompanying me whelped with delight at the excitement which broke the monotony of following me around looking at yet another boring box of rocks!
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