- The Guardian,
- Tuesday November 28 2000
Mr Antonio supplements his meagre income from working on the land in the drought-afflicted north-east of Brazil by selling fossils to tourists and palaeontologists.
He is known locally as a "fishmonger", because of the abundance of fish fossils in the Araripe mountains, which is the world's most important site of the early Cretaceous period. Mr Antonio, 56, will sell you items worth several hundred pounds in Europe or the US for the equivalent of some spare change.
Researchers have found about 30 species of fish here, almost all the orders of insects, crustaceans, and 18 types of flying pterosaurs. The only three-dimensional fossil of a dinosaur's soft tissue was found here in the 1990s.
But the remoteness of the Araripe mountains, 1,100 miles north of Rio de Janeiro, combined with the poverty of the local population and the absence of any policing, has allowed most of the fossils to end up in foreign museums or private collections.
Brazilian scientists are enraged by the plunder of their national heritage.
"We have all the deficiencies of a third world country in terms of infrastructure and supervision", Alexander Kellner of the National Museum in Rio de Janeiro said. "It is just not fair that other countries with more money can come and take things away."
"In Brazil there is an active palaeontological community. The primary material which is leaving the country is hindering our research."
Artur Andrade, a geologist who works for the ministry of energy and mines, believes there is an organised system of fossil trafficking.
"We are impotent because the statutes are so archaic", he said.
Two years ago Santana do Cariri, a small town in the heart of the Araripe region, reopened its paleontology museum. Its coordinator, Maria Iva Peixoto, said it had helped to stop trafficking because local people brought fossils there instead of selling them. Sometimes the museum's director pays small amounts to the "fishmongers" for valuable items.
But the illegal trade continues. European academics, who are often more interested in their own research than in the issue of Brazilian sovereignty, regard the fossil trade as beneficial.
David Martill, a paleontologist at Portsmouth University, said: "I personally have no interest in seeing the trade stopped, provided that the material ends up in a scientific collection rather than on the top of someone's mantlepiece."
He added: "Also, the trade provides work for some very, very poor people, honest people who are close to starvation when the crops fail - as they do frequently in the [Araripe]."
