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Albertosaurus tooth from the lower horseshoe canyon formation I found yesterday. There are a lot of teeth in this area but most are fractured long before they are ever exposed to the surface. Almost everything is on the edge of a cliff out there, so the sun, rain, gravity, and the hoof of a moose are all racing to destroy specimens first. These things do not last for “centuries and millennia” on the surface. There is no “leaving it for the next guy”. The most ethical thing to do it so take a gps tagged in situ photo, and learn the process of how to consolidate and safely extract fossils. It is very, very different from finding an arrowhead under an overhang (which is a scenario where something genuinely could last thousands of years on the surface).
In my experience dealing with professional archaeologists and paleontologists, there ate pragmatists who are helping the field, and idealists who are actively harming it. The idealists who think that nobody except somebody with a PhD should be able to collect a fossil end up being the people who never have anything reported to them, and inevitably cause amateurs to hoard more finds. They are simply shooting themselves in the foot. On the other hand, there are pragmatists who view amateur collectors as a resource to be utilized, and they build rapport with amateurs. I have one strong contact who is one of the most important people at one of the most important paleo museums in the world, and he is one of these pragmatists.
