Kristen

I was very impressed by the picture  Douglas Preston had painted of Roy Chapman Andrews, and found everything about the man to be extremely fascinating on all fronts (not to mention he is rumored to be the real-life model for Indiana Jones!)  I never knew the movie was based on anyone.  What I found particularly striking was that Andrew's expedition team were thought to be the first men to ever set eyes on dinosaur eggs.  After reading this I immediately thought of a conversation we had in class a while back concerning the replication of artifacts.  There is something so overwhelmingly important and exciting about seeing dinosaur eggs for the first time, that it reminded me about the need to see "the real thing".   For some reason, a replicate of dino eggs just wouldn't suffice!

Even more interesting about the reading was the fact that it was later learned that some 20 thousand years before, humans had gathered dinosaur eggs and placed them in graves.  This gets back to what Preston called an "almost atavistic urge to collect".  Collecting obviously goes way back, and leads me to believe it is an instinct of ours; an instinct that may one day get the best of us.  What will happen when there isn't much left to collect( as far as artifacts and ethnographic field notes are concerned) ?Although,  I guess we will always find something new to study, classify, and put into our own language, libraries, and museums.