Holland has significant claim, along with England, to being a strong and early bastion of freedom. So it is fitting that today Holland’s institutions provide a sanctuary for the practice of citizen science. The article below notes that Dutch law gives citizen scientists property rights in the fossils they find. This gives them an incentive to seek fossils AND it gives them an incentive to share information about what they find. (If they did not have such property rights, they would have an incentive to hide the fossils so they would not be seized.)
Dick Moll is an entrepreneur, using some of his fossils as part of a Historyland theme park. His doing good through creative funding, reminds me of Martin Couney, who financed baby incubators for poor families, by displaying the incubators at theme park exhibits.
If academic scientists, instead of hiding behind their credentials, sought clever ways to recruit the eyes of curious citizen scientists, we could learn much more and learn it much more quickly. This would be easier if the values and methods of science were more empirical, more true to Galileo. Let everyone have a look in the telescope.
(p. C1) After scouring a beach in the harbor all morning in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, a retired Dutch engineer, Cock van den Berg, had finally found something interesting: a polished black stone about the size of an acorn with two punctures, like finger holes in a bowling ball.
He held it out in the palm of his hand to show Dick Mol, an expert on ice age fossils.
“What do you think?” he asked. “Is it a mammoth tooth?”
Mol examined it for about 30 seconds and decided it was not. It was a molar from a prehistoric rhinoceros, he said.
. . .
(p. C6) Under Dutch law, beach combers who find fossils on Maasvlakte 2 are not required to report or submit them. They can take their finds home if they like, but they are encouraged to promote scientific research by voluntarily registering them with the Naturalis Biodiversity Center, a national natural history museum and research center in the city of Leiden.
Using a website built by the port of Rotterdam authority and managed by Naturalis, amateur paleontologists can submit a photo and the GPS location of the find so that experts can help them identify it.
“In other countries, like Germany, fossils or anything related to paleontology are protected by the state, but that’s not the case in the Netherlands,” explained Isaak Eijkelboom, a Ph.D. student in paleontology at Naturalis who studies fossils found at Maasvlakte 2 and other locations.
But since trophy hunters don’t have to worry about losing their finds, he thinks they’re more likely to share their discoveries with the museum and collaborate with scientists.
“It allows us to practice citizen science,” Eijkelboom said.
For more than a decade, Naturalis has been using volunteers to gather information for its fossil database, which now lists more than 23,000 finds, he said.
“This is only possible because it’s so open, and so free,” Eijkelboom said. “In other places, when people find fossils, they end up in their closets and the knowledge is hidden away.”
Van den Berg, who discovered the rhinoceros molar, said he was excited to share it with Naturalis. A few years ago, he found a jaw part from a macaque monkey at Maasvlakte 2 and donated it to the Natural History Museum in Rotterdam. The rare specimen, which scientists dated to 125,000 years ago, was described in three scientific papers, Mol said.
. . .
Mol joked that the “biggest mistake of van den Berg’s life” was donating the monkey jaw to the museum and not to Mol’s “Mammoth Lab” at Historyland, a museum and theme park that he helped establish in the town of Hellevoetsluis, about a 15-minute drive from the beach.
There, Mol, a retired airport customs official, has his own impressive collection of 55,000 ice age fossils. An autodidact who never attended university, Mol is nonetheless widely recognized as an international expert; in 2000, he was knighted in the Netherlands for his significant contributions to paleontology, and he was featured in Discovery Channel documentaries such as “Raising the Mammoth” and “Land of the Mammoth.”
. . .
In spite of a steady stream of beachcombers, Eijkelboom said there will still be plenty more fossils to find for a long time to come.
“In general, in paleontology, a lot of people say we’ve only discovered the tip of the iceberg,” he said. Rising sea levels will require continued fortifications of the Dutch coastline, using North Sea sand deposits for quite some time to come, he added.
Although it is unfortunate that such action is needed to prevent humans from going extinct like the mammoth, he said, “at least there will be more and more beaches where we can hunt for ice age fossils.”
For the full story see:
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the story has the date Nov. 17, 2025, and has the title “A Day at the Beach Hunting Mammoths.”)