Sir

Although the federal legislation being prepared to safeguard the fossil record may attain some of the wished-for goals described in your News story “US lays out bare bones of fossil protection package” (see Nature 413, 555; 2001), experience and theory suggest that fossil theft from federal lands will continue.

Assuming there is strict enforcement, criminalizing the unauthorized removal of fossils and increasing penalties may reduce pillaging in the short run, but over the long term the trade in looted archaeological and other cultural property has increased since efforts started being made to control it.

Black markets for palaeontological specimens continue to flourish in China (see Nature 406, 930–932; 2000) despite central government efforts to crack down on fossil smuggling. Colin Renfrew, professor of archaeology at the University of Cambridge, has concluded that 30 years after the adoption of the 1970 UNESCO convention to halt the illicit trade in cultural property, the destruction of archaeological sites through looting has increased rather than diminished (see Trade in Illicit Antiquities, eds N. Brodie et al., xi–xii; McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research, Cambridge, 2001).

Price theory suggests that a divergence between a market price and an officially imposed price (because the legal sale of fossil specimens on federal lands is prohibited, the price is close to zero) fosters a black market and creates incentives for theft and looting, resulting in a permanent loss to our knowledge of the fossil record. In other sectors of society, creating a market and a price for a resource that had previously been cost-free, such as clean air, has resulted in conservation of the good, in this instance reflected in a sharp fall in air pollution from coal-fired power plants in the American Midwest.

Applying the profit mechanism and market incentives to the management of palaeontological resources could similarly result in the improved conservation and preservation of the fossil record.