One bright day last September, Icarosaurus, the famous fossil of a Triassic Age gliding reptile, which had exited the halls of the American Museum of Natural History a decade earlier, was brought back to New York to roost. Its return was a wake-up call for public education and science everywhere. Unless action is taken, fossils will continue to be sold to the highest bidder. Sad to say, the US is not the only country with this problem.

The story begins in 1961 with three teenagers combing the New Jersey Palisades, the cliffs surrounding the Hudson River across from New York City, searching for ancient fossils. An old quarry was being widened and leveled, and the boys followed the bulldozers as they scraped away a stratum of earth to reveal fragile, fossil-bearing shale underneath. One day they found an ancient reptile with long ribs that enabled it to glide between trees.

The boys brought the specimen to the Museum of Natural History, where its curator recognized the importance of the find and named it after one of the boys. Three decades later, one of them, now a man, became sick and needed money. He asked the Museum for compensation for the fossil. When his multimillion-dollar demand was refused, he spoke of legal action and claimed the specimen was only on loan to the Museum. The papers proved him correct. So the Museum let Icarosaurus go.

The fossil was offered to the highest bidder. After nearly ten years, when no museum or private buyer met his price, the man put Icarosaurus up for sale at auction – a shock to the world of paleontology.

When should individuals have the right to buy and sell such a fossil? The boys who found the specimen didn’t own the fossil quarry. So why do they have any rights to it? Why does it not belong to everyone? Why not put it in a public institution where scientists can study it and the public can admire it in perpetuity?

American policy on fossil artifacts is more benighted than those of most third world countries. Each year, uncounted skeletons of dinosaurs and fossil mammals and fishes are whisked through airport customs and sold to the highest bidder. International commercial fossil collectors flock to the American West to vacuum up duckbills, carnivores, ceratopsians, and everything that will fetch a price. They pay landowners for exclusive collecting rights on ranches, displacing paleontologists and ruining publicly funded research and graduate dissertations.

Fossil bones are harvested and made into mounted skeletons, often with little regard for accuracy. Some are sawn and polished to be made into clock faces, gewgaws, and souvenirs. If these were trees, we could grow more. But Jurrasic Park is fiction, dinosaurs will be no more.

Icarosaurus was rescued from the auction block by a philanthropic and conservation-minded businessman repelled by the thought that such valuable treasures could be lost to science and education. Such individuals should not be pivotal to preserving the natural heritage.

The US is not alone in this problem. China, Argentina, Brazil, and many other countries are losing their fossil resources to marketplaces, fossil conventions, and internet dealers. International cooperation is one way to stem this tide; stronger internal laws another. Practices vary among countries and even within them. In Bavaria, for example, there are no regulations on the ownership of fossils found on private land, while landowners in Baden-Württember are given finder's fees for important specimens, which must be turned over to the state.

Commercial fossil collectors are trying to get US public lands - national parks and wildernesses – as open for business as private lands are. Why should such people control the fate of irreplaceable natural resources? What are the limits of land ownership when nature’s legacy is in the balance? Public lands should continue to be closed to commercial exploitation. Valuable scientific specimens, no matter who happens to own the land, should not be at the disposition of those who see only dollar signs in nature.

On the other hand, commercial collectors could work with scientists and the public. They could excavate specimens on private lands, and on public lands, too, under the supervision of scientists who know how to recover important information about what their surroundings, such as what the rocks say about the fossil when it was alive. Original and unique specimens would be remanded to museums for permanent care, common or incomplete specimens still be bought and sold. Businessmen could make casts and mounted skeletons of the specimen and market them to other museums, schools, companies, and shopping centers.

In this way everyone benefits. The public could get a piece of the history of life and the natural heritage is preserved. Whether commercial collectors will agree to such a plan without legislative coercion remains to be seen. So scientists, educators, and the international public must hold the line against commercial exploitation of public lands, and push for laws and treaties that stop the flow of valuable fossils across international borders – both physical borders, and those of common sense.