3 ms·
Mars rock found in Niger sells for millions in NY, now the country wants answers
- ljf 1y agoPrevious discussion after the auction https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44609154 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44609154
- bell-cot 1y agoCorrect URL for article: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cly3q635n4no https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cly3q635n4no (Original HN url is missing the final 'o' - so "404...".) The major thrust of the article seems to be Prof. Paul Sereno - he's a paleontologist at the Univ. of Chicago - trying to defend "his own" academic turf. > Prof Sereno, who founded the organisation Niger Heritage a decade ago, is convinced Nigerien law was broken. > "International law says you cannot simply take something that is important to the heritage of a country - be it a cultural item, a physical item, a natural item, an extraterrestrial item - out of the country. You know we've moved on from colonial times when all this was okay," Prof Sereno says. IANAL, but I'll call BS on saying that a rock from Mars - which plausibly no human in Niger had ever suspected the existence of - is "important to the heritage of" Niger. (Vs. if he'd said it's a natural resource - same as the oil, gold, and whatever else natural geological processes dumped within the lines-drawn-on-human-maps portion of the Earth that we call Niger - okay, reasonable.) The actual government of Niger seems far less concerned than Prof Sereno. And admits that it doesn't have any legislation on meteorites.