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WHEN £500 FOR YOUR SHIT IS NOT ENOUGH (A STORY FOR A FRIDAY 13TH)
2 Comments- Add comment Written on 13-Feb-2009 by patencia__165__.jpg)
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.
This seemed to be a perfect story for a Friday 13th. Good luck Daniel.
"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Another well known tragic story of confussion: when John Stuart Mill's maid mistook the only available manuscript of an unpublished work of Thomas Carlyle for trash and lit the fire with it.
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