Popular Culture Review Vol. 14, No. 1, February 2003 | Page 53

The Defining Dinosaur

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bar—necessary for the processing of the contextual data. Horner claims it is his
“fundamental concern” how best to “preserve the scientific value of fossils” (239).
One of the ways to “best preserve” scientific value is, evidently, to keep “amateur”
bone-hunters away from artifacts.
There is a force even more destructive of scientific value, one in direct com
petition with “sanctioned” scientists such as Horner and his crews. “For better or
worse,” Horner laments, “dinosaur bones have become expensive commodities”
(239). Because of this increase in exchange value, the “commercial collector” has
proliferated. This type of fossil hunter sells some or all of what he or she finds to
museums and private collectors. For Horner, this is doubly troubling. In the first
place, commercial collectors are beholden to the imperative to turn a profit: “The
engine that drives commercial collection, reserving its largest rewards for those
who don’t take the trouble to conduct scientifically rigorous excavations, is, of
course, the marketplace itself... .Under conditions in which the sole motive is mak
ing money, not only will priceless information be lost, and lost forever, but that
which does survive will [not] be trustworthy.. .science will be displaced by a side
show” (243). The inexorable demand of capital destroys scientific value through
the creation or realization of exchange value. The two values are set up as not
merely binary, but mutually exclusive; one cannot exist simultaneously with the
other.
Commercial collection is also an undesirable undertaking for the reason that
it “restricts” access to the specimens collected. Horner considers fossils to be “na
tional treasures, a public trust placed in the care of public institutions,” and he
decries commercial collectors who wish “to turn a resource that now exists for the
eternal educational benefit of everyone, into one that exists for the short-term fi
nancial benefit of a few” (238). In order to avoid this fate, Horner agitates for
legislation that would take all fossil artifacts out of private ownership: “Fossils
should be public property, and entrusted to scientific institutions to study. Period”
{Complete rex 77). Scientific value becomes a transcendent category at this point,
an enlightening quality proper to the fossil itself that can be destroyed or lost when
the object is “taken out of circulation” in society. A national “treasure” can evi
dently only be so as long as it is not exchanged, as long as it maintains an identity
distinct from that of a commodity. The actual “exchange” cannot be the destruc
tive moment: scientific institutions and museums, after all, frequently “exchange”
objects amongst themselves. It is exchange of commodities, the realization of ex
change value, the “cashing ouf’ of value from the scientific object, which destroys
its scientific value. Although we can read scientific value as resulting from “value
adding” scientific labor, a “working” of site data that is then “constellated” about
the fossil itself, resulting in a new holistic object, the fact remains that Horner’s
texts construct and imply scientific value as an intrinsic quality of “the fossil.” In