[NHCOLL-L:1140] MOSCOW PALAEONOTLOGICAL INSTITUTE

Sat Aug 4 06:02:28 EDT 2001

For information - from Christian Science Monitor via Museum Security
Network.

Patrick Boylan
(City University London)

=================================

From:           	Dan Chure <danchure at easilink.com>
Subject:        	Skullduggery among Russia's old bones

Skullduggery among Russia's old bones

Byline:  Fred Weir Special to The Christian Science Monitor Date: 07/30/2001 Click here to 
read this story online: http://www.csmonitor.com/durable/2001/07/30/fp1s3-csm.shtml  

(MOSCOW)The faded Gothic building that houses Russia's scandal-ridden Paleontological 
Institute is a musty labyrinth of dimly lit corridors that sometimes end abruptly or plunge 
into a murky stairwell. Crowded along the walls, cabinets bulge with fossils and jumbled 
heaps of ancient rock, assorted skulls, and dinosaur bones. It is the perfect setting for a 
whodunit.  

And there is a mystery here.

Over the past decade hundreds of unique fossils, potentially worth millions of dollars, have 
vanished from the 200-year-old collection of the institute, which is known by its acronym 
PIN.  
A few Russian paleontologists, cautiously backed by a group of Western colleagues, have 
accused the institute's directors of master minding the heists and using the proceeds to set 
up private companies. Those same firms, they allege, are now ravaging Russia's fragile 
natural fossil deposits and collaborating with PIN insiders to fake the "expert certificates" 
required by Russian law to export scientifically important specimens to lucrative Western 
fossil markets.  
"We have foxes guarding the hen house," says Larissa Doguzhayeva, a leading PIN 
researcher who says she was demoted and had her salary cut after she started 
investigating the thefts several years ago. "In the past decade, those in power started 
privatizing the state property under their control and using it to enrich themselves. That's 
the only explanation for what happened here at PIN."  
No one denies that massive thefts did take place at PIN, mostly in the chaotic and poverty-
stricken 1990s, when scientists' salaries dropped below subsistence level. Many experts 
left the institute, and some started fossil-exporting businesses. But beyond that, says PIN 
director Alexei Rozanov, "the allegations are abhorrent, the worst kind of lies." He refuses 
to talk further, saying only that "the police have not made any charges based on this, 
nothing at all."  
In December 1996, a reporter for the science journal Nature asked PIN deputy director Igor 
Novikov why the institute had reported almost none of the fossil thefts from its inventory to 
police. Novikov said there was little point in doing so, since "we cannot expect much help in 
such cases from the police, either Russian or Interpol." One case that was reported 
remains unsolved, although police concluded it was an inside job.  
Arkady Zakharov, a former PIN scientist who founded a company called Russian Fossils, 
says the issue of thefts is a red herring launched by political forces who want to discredit 
capitalism. "The main issue is not a few items that were stolen years ago," he says. "It's 
about private property that is gathered and restored by companies that work in a normal 
way. Scientists like Doguzhayeva think our property should be expropriated."  
Countries around the world regulate paleontological finds in a number of ways. In the US, 
rules vary according to who owns the land where the item is found. In Canada, the state 
has the right to buy any fossil determined to be scientifically valuable.  
Ms. Doguzhayeva, a top expert on ammonites, or prehistoric mollusks, says she became 
alarmed one day in 1996 when Mr. Zakharov brought a German fossil dealer named 
Joachim Wordemann to see her. "They offered to buy a big collection of ammonites I had 
just gathered in field work," she says. "I told them it was state property, and asked them to 
leave my office."  
A few weeks later, upon returning from a conference abroad, she found the collection had 
been stolen. "There is no doubt it was an inside job," she says. PIN director Rozanov 
showed no interest in the disappearance, she says, and refused to report it to the police.  
Zakharov, the scientist-turned-merchant, denies that the visit to Doguzhayeva's office ever 
took place.  
In a separate incident, Mr. Wordemann, the German fossil dealer, was arrested by Russian 
authorities in St. Petersburg in 1999 and charged with trying to transport a truckload of 
partially undocumented fossils into Finland.  
By the mid-'90s, some Western paleontologists began to notice valuable specimens from 
the world-famous PIN inventory turning up on private markets in Europe and the US. One 
day in 1994, Rupert Wild, curator of the State Museum for Natural History in Stuttgart, 
Germany, was amazed to see a unique 240-million-year-old amphibian skull available for 
private sale. So he asked the dealer - the same Wordemann - if he could borrow it. Back in 
his office, under special lighting, Dr. Wild found a partially erased Soviet catalog number 
from PIN stencilled on the piece. The skull was later returned to Russia.  
An informal working group of seven Western paleontologists, including Dr. Wild, was 
created to help identify and recover stolen Russian fossils from crooked dealers. It compiled 
an extensive list of missing items that included rare dinosaur skeletons, mammoth tusks, 
remains of the extinct cave bear, and Doguzhayeva's ammonites. But the group ran up 
against a brick wall after asking PIN directors to confirm other suspected thefts.  
"Numerous lines of evidence point to an organized group operating within PIN, with direct 
access to PIN collections, well developed contacts with foreign commercial dealers, and 
the facility to move stolen items through Russian customs," said the group's 1998 report. 
Without cooperation from PIN, the Western scientists have been able to do little since. "We 
were met with such opposition by the Institute in Moscow, which we were naively trying to 
help," says Prof. Michael Benton of Bristol University, one of the group's members. "That in 
itself is interesting."  
Even Doguzhayeva, the whistle-blower, says the pillaging of PIN's collections has probably 
ended. The same people have moved from burglary to business, she alleges. Russia's rich 
fossil grounds are being ruined by ruthless predators, working in league with rogue 
scientists, who smash the sedimentary strata with machinery and cart fossils away by the 
truckload. "The last time I went to search for ammonites, near Shilovka on the Volga River, I 
was stunned by the destruction," she says. "I wept for days."  
Last January the Ministry of Culture, which has authority over art and antiquities in Russia, 
asked Doguzhayeva to examine a collection of 12,000 ammonites recently dug up in the 
Volga region by Mr. Zakharov's Russian Fossils company. An expert from PIN had already 
certified the batch, potentially worth tens of thousands of dollars, as "scientifically 
worthless" and therefore eligible for export. "I was flabbergasted," Doguzhayeva says. "You 
could have written several papers about some of those specimens."  
But Zakharov tells a very different story. He says all excavations are carried out with the 
participation of scientists, who are given free access to any really interesting finds. "Maybe 
some fossils are unique, and should be in a museum, but how many examples of a 
particular type of ammonite does Doguzhayeva need?," he says. "According to her, they 
should all belong to science, as in Soviet days. She cannot get used to the idea that we 
have a market economy now, and these fossils are my private property." Zakharov 
concedes that his company pays experts from PIN to evaluate fossils and certify them for 
export, but denies any conflict of interest. "The experts would be paid whether they certify 
the fossils or not," he says. "We have to pay them because the Ministry of Culture can't 
afford to."  
At least one top PIN official remains a "good friend," says Zakharov, though "there is 
emphatically no business relationship." And he acknowledges that his main foreign partner 
is Wordemann, but he insists that the German dealer's legal misadventures were "all his 
own doing."  
For Zakharov, the case of the stolen PIN materials is a police matter and none of his affair. 
The real problem today, he says, is the Soviet mind-set of government officials who cannot 
tolerate the idea of modern commerce in fossils. Doguzhayeva, whose angry resistance 
has prompted the Ministry of Culture to block the export of his ammonite collection, is 
"totally subjective." He says, "She is against business. How can she be allowed to have so 
much influence?".  
Doguzhayeva has a different view. "A few people enriched themselves by looting our 
nation's heritage," she says. "They want us to forget the past, accept them as normal 
businessmen, and agree that all is right with the world. I can't reconcile myself to that."  