From Geoffrey Cox, Rotorua, New Zealand
The sale of valuable fossils to the highest bidder is unfortunate, but not new (28 November 2020, p 23). In 1861, when the first largely complete Archaeopteryx fossil was discovered, it was quickly acquired by collector Karl Haberlein, who made his fortune a year later when he sold it to the British Museum, with the rest of his collection, for £700 – a lot of money at the time.
About 15 years later, his son acquired the next Archaeopteryx fossil and made a packet selling it to a musuem in Berlin.
