Dave Hone

It's just sitting on this stuff.

It's more that they're not necessarily exploiting it with fossils in mind.

Yeah, but, you know, one billion on its own would go a very, very long way, almost infinitely, if you're just creaming off the interest.

And then funding excavations and supporting scientists who are already embedded in other museums or other universities or other research institutes.

So the rest is for buying up land so that those people can do the work.

Yeah.

You look at somewhere like, you know, Brazil and there's, I can never remember the name of it, but there's, again, one of these zones of exceptional preservation where superlative pterosaurs, fish, we've had a handful of dinosaurs and a whole bunch of other stuff has come out.

And it's just a giant commercial mining operation.

And yeah, when they hit a fossil, when they think they're close to it, yeah, they stop and pull it out and they'll send it to a museum.

And more often they'll sell it to a museum and museums only have so much money.

Whereas what if I owned that quarry?

And then I made sure everyone who worked there was trained and got a bonus every time they found anything.

And then I just handed everything they dug up straight into a museum.

So there will be some element of a crowdsource.

Yeah, but it's more that like no researcher ever needs to spend money to access that.

No museum needs to go and find a new donor to give them half a million to go and buy this one specimen knowing that it might still go missing.

Yeah, to some Silicon Valley billionaire's foyer or whatever.

It's like, well, I own the land, so it's mine.

So problem solved.

I've jokingly written a couple of times about how all science funding in the world should go to paleontology.