A Fossil of a Mystery

Minnesota’s Concordia College archaeology department was in possession of fossils that were taken from tribal land in South Dakota. This fossil, excavated from land belonging to the Standing Rock Sioux tribe, is a modern day whodunit.

Researchers at Concordia just spent the past four weeks packing up the bones, which include the remains of dinosaurs, and trucking them back to the Sioux reservation, after acknowledging the fossils were taken from Sioux land.

A report last month in the Star Tribune of Minneapolis attributed the situation to a now-retired biology professor at Concordia who led fossil-hunting expeditions to the area in 2003. The digging began on private land “and edged onto the reservation,” the Star Tribune reported. The college readily agreed to return the fossils, in a show of good faith and in a bid to help the economically struggling tribe establish its own paleontology program, the newspaper said.

Another professor alleged that he had permission to dig on the land, but that the Sioux tribe had later changed its mind. He is quoted as having said, “We found out,” that you can’t just go by their word. Is this what they mean by speaking with forked tongue?

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