Questions About Burke Museum's Fossil Collection
In their report, the experts concluded that the excavation sites listed for many specimens are so poorly described that the specimens have little scientific value. They also questioned whether Burke collectors got proper permits to search for fossils on federal, state and tribal lands.
David Hodge, dean of the UW's College of Arts and Sciences, requested the review completed last week. He was following up on complaints about the field practices of John Rensberger, the Burke's former vertebrate paleontology curator, who retired in 2004 after 35 years building up the collection.
In 2002, Rensberger and a group of students were caught collecting fossils without a permit on the Hanford Reach National Monument in Eastern Washington.
Rensberger, still a professor emeritus at the UW, defends his field work as legal and scientifically sound. He dismisses the criticism as "absolutely ridiculous."
"We kept excellent records of all the specimens we collected," he told The Seattle Times, adding that more than 80 percent of the collection was excavated before federal permits were required.
The new report, written by three respected paleontologists, says permits were routine by the 1980s. They found permits for just four of the dozens of field expeditions Rensberger led in Wyoming, Montana and Oregon since 1980.
Of greater concern to them are the murky descriptions of excavation sites.
Jack Horner, a famed dinosaur hunter, said many of the Burke's specimens are useless for his research, which seeks to determine how dinosaurs evolved. He needs to know precisely where bones were discovered - which stratigraphic layers, and the age of those layers.
The label for a triceratops skull he examined here offered only the county and general geologic formation, said Horner, who is with Montana State University's Museum of the Rockies.
"The most important thing about dinosaurs is the age of the rocks they come out of," he said.
Horner said he checked with the Bureau of Land Management in Montana several times when he heard Rensberger was working on BLM land in the Hell Creek formation, where many dinosaur fossils have been found.
"He never had a permit, so nobody knew where he was," Horner said.
Bruce Crowley, who prepares fossils at the Burke, was among the first to report concerns with Rensberger's methods. He joined Rensberger on an expedition in the early 2000s, but the paleontologist wouldn't tell him where they were going.
When he learned they were headed for Hell Creek, Crowley asked to see the permit. When Rensberger refused, Crowley caught the next bus back to Seattle and filed a report with university administrators.
The team of paleontologists examined a fraction of the museum's collection for the new report. But they found several serious labeling problems: Coordinates for one fossil primate put it in the middle of a highway. In other cases, locations were off by as much as two miles.
"It's almost like saying, 'I collected this fossil in the University District,' " said Julie Stein, who took over as museum director four months ago.
The report suggests Rensberger might have deliberately mislabeled fossils to keep his favorite sites to himself.
"Recording and reporting locality data apparently was conducted with a disregard for completeness and accuracy, either through carelessness or deliberate falsification,"it concludes.
"Many specimens in the Burke are beautifully preserved and skillfully prepared, but their significance to modern paleontology may have been drastically and perhaps irretrievably reduced."
Last week, Stein sent campus police to Rensberger's house with a letter requesting all of his field notes. He turned over 10 notebooks, which seem to include more detail on locations, Stein said. The museum is hiring several graduate students to catalog the entire collection, using Rensberger's notebooks and other data to provide better locations.
"We are going to fix this," Stein said.
The museum also plans to contact all the federal and tribal owners of land where fossils were collected. Some fossils may be returned, Stein said.