WHEN £500 FOR YOUR SHIT IS NOT ENOUGH (A STORY FOR A FRIDAY 13TH)

Scientific labs as museums and art galleries, are places where things are not always exactly what they look like. This means that in these contexts certain rules that you have learnt by heart as a good citizen (as the one illustrated above) may not be applicable, at the risk of getting you or others into serious trouble.

This is what happened at the University of Leeds, where the cleaning personnel threw away what they took to be just 35Kg of shit. Yet, it turned out that it was a unique collection of a very rare lizard's excrement that represented seven years of work of PhD canditate Daniel Bennett.

"Whether it was the largest collection of lizard shit in the world is uncertain, but it certainly contained the only dietary sample from that little-known species Varanus olivaceus, and probably the most complete dietary record of any single population of animals in South East Asia. Its loss left me reeling and altered the course of my life forever."

The University offered Daniel £500 as compensation, which he obviously refused.

This seemed to be a perfect story for a Friday 13th. Good luck Daniel.

Another well known tragic story of confussion: when John Stuart Mill's maid mistook the only available manuscript of an unpublished work of Thomas Carlyle for trash and lit the fire with it.

Comments

written on 13-Feb-2009
Rodrigo Varela [http://www.pormisfogones.eu] says:
I've recently heard story about a rare Chippendale's design found in a barn. The art merchant, trying to get it as cheap as possible, told the owners he had to fix a table which needed the same legs as the one in the barn. When he went back with his truck they had sawn the legs and used the rest as wood.
written on 14-Feb-2009
patencia says:
AUCH! Here's when that good old saying makes sense: lo barato sale caro.

Writing Desk » WHEN £500 FOR YOUR SHIT IS NOT ENOUGH (A STORY FOR A FRIDAY 13TH)

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