The situation in Florida seems to be a common theme. I'm not sure who to
blame. One cannot really blame the businesses, given the threat of lawsuits
and and such. Like in resonse to some of the mis-guided restrictions on live
shelling (not that all restrictions are mis-guided), perhaps some kind of
lobby group needs to exist to protect both collectors and property owners.
 
Here in Juneau (Alaska) we also have a Pleistocene fossil bed with easy to
collect and remarkebly well-preserved shells. These are huge (100 m+ thick)
glacial deposits representing benthic communities from approximately 200 m
to the high intertidal and anywhere from 8,000 to 12,000 years old.
Unfortunately, we attempted to organize a formal study instead of our usual
random sampling. We obtained permission from the property owner, but as soon
as he saw students measuring out gridlines in his hillside, he nixed the
whole project (He wasn't really clear why, I suspect he didn't really know
why). So, for the time being 10,000 year old Neptunea with opercula and Mya
truncata with preserved adductor muscles are eroding away at the surface
completely unstudied.
Aaron Baldwin
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