Mastodon bonanza for creationist - January 24, 2008
Earlier this month we brought you the strange tale of a creationist who wanted $60,000 for a rare mastodon fossil. A few days ago it sold at auction for $191,200, which the Dallas News manages to mention without coming near the fact that the director and curator of the Mt. Blanco Fossil Museum who put it up for auction claims to be “the world’s only creationist field palaeontologist”.
The sale is good news for the uniquely qualified man in question, Joe Taylor. He told AP he would be closing his museum if the auction didn’t raise enough money to cover $136,000 he owed following a legal dispute over another fossil (alluded to in our original blog post).
“We’ve struggled so long here just to keep this thing going. We’re kind of losing interest. You can just tread water for so long,” Taylor said before the auction.
While this is good for Taylor then, it is rather less good for the average scientific level of US museums, which would have undergone something of a fillip if Mt. Blanco had closed.
