Does the Division of Paleontology accept donations of fossil material?
With a collection as large and as comprehensive as ours, and because of very limited space, we have to be very choosy about any material offered to us. Any fossils that we might consider accepting must of course be relevant to our collections. This could be because it fills a gap in what we have in our collections or what the science of paleontology currently knows. We are very unlikely to accept a fossil specimen of a type for which we already have scores of examples. Additionally, but even more importantly, any specimens we consider accepting must have documentation showing two things: legality and locality. It must be shown that a specimen was legally acquired by the person offering it and it must have information describing precisely where it was found. Without this latter information, little, if any, worthy science can be conducted on the specimen.
