Nicola Davis

speaker

498 appearances 6 recordings 1 series first heard May 2026 last heard 18 Aug

Nicola Davis’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

Trend

recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 6 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 3.

Appearances

newest first · ▶ plays the moment

Science Weekly · The ultra rich are collecting fossils, and that’s bad for science · 18 Aug 2026 podcast

These are not necessarily sums of money many institutions are gonna necessarily have access to.

It means that some museums are just priced out.

And that matters because what people might not understand is that if you h own a fossil privately, even if you say, Scientists, you're welcome to come, pop over for a cup of tea and look at my fossils.

Uh the problem is that a lot of journals won't accept studies based on privately owned fossils.

And that's for a good reason, which is that the whole point about science is that other people should be able to come, make their own measurements, test your conclusions.

And if it's in a private collection, that invitation to come and study it could be withdrawn at any point.

It's not just accessible it on the on the same ground.

to everybody.

And that means that

that scientific process it could be jeopardised.

When fossils end up in private collections, even if they're loaned to a museum, that's still a problem because that loan could be retracted.

Especially if you've got um spectacular fossils, if you've got fossils of new species, things like that, where there is a scientific interest, you really need those fossils to be somewhere that scientists can go and look at them and study them.

I had a fantastic guide who really was amazing.

He was very good at helping us, myself and the photographer that came with me, I should say, to understand what we were looking for, about the colours and shapes and textures.

And so when you're looking down, you're keeping those in your head so that you're kind of really scanning for that unusual item.

And I was able to find a few ammonites, some beautiful iron pyrite ammonites and some bellamite fossils.

These are like can I

Squid like creatures, um, and some fossilised wood uh and some fossilised sponges.

So we found we found some very exciting different things.

We find some very

Showing 81–100 of 498 · page 5 of 25