Article: Institutional Responsibility for Palaeontological Collections

Although fossil collections are housed in various institutions, they should be regarded as the property of science as a whole, and thus over and above the personal responsibility of individual curators there is a collective responsibility among a wide spectrum of people and organizations for their care and management. The roles of museum administrators, universities and other training organizations, professional societies, publications, and national funding agencies are discussed in relation to this collective responsibility. Many of the guide-lines for collection management were outlined in the nineteenth century, and the museum profession has either ignored, or been slow in recognizing the need for collective action to implement those policies required to safeguard an important part of our evolutionary heritage.