NEW YORK, March 18. /TASS/. An American professor has filed a lawsuit against a university in New Jersey, claiming that the negligence of the school’s staff led to the 380-million-year-old fossils he dug up winding up at a landfill, NBC News reported.
The claimant, named as Martin Becker, a professor of environmental science and a paleontologist at William Paterson University, says the fossils were dumped at a landfill after the New Jersey college failed to pay its UPS bill.
Becker claims to have spent "hundreds upon hundreds of hours" collecting the Devonian age marine invertebrate fossils from the High Mountain area of Wayne, New Jersey, and planned to write a comprehensive monograph on the subject in collaboration with a colleague. He needed to send the fossils to his colleague in Florida and on June 18 packed around 200 fossils, or about 80% of all of them, into 19 boxes. On the same day, the boxes were taken to the university mailroom and handed over to mailroom supervisor Raymond Boone, who is named as a defendant in the lawsuit.
The boxes were picked up by UPS but never reached Florida. On September 20, Boone told Becker that the fossil boxes were probably at the UPS fraud department. On September 30, the scientist contacted UPS, learning that his packages were "intercepted" because William Paterson University had not paid its bill, and that the delivery was canceled.
"Our client learned that the packages were dumped at an unidentified landfill somewhere in or around Nashville, Tennessee," the suit reads.
According to the lawsuit, Becker is seeking unspecified damages for the lost fossils and medical expenses for emotional distress.