Fossil Site Privacy

It’s been a couple of years since we covered this subject, but it appears that it is time to bring it up again.  We have many new members, so it’s good to go over some important facts about our field trip sites. 

First of all, our organization works very hard to procure the permission of landowners in order to have places where we can do our field collecting.  We do collect on some sites that are considered “public” like road cuts or the Frankstown site for instance, but many of our trips are on private property.  Every time NMGMS schedules a field trip on private property, our field trip chair calls and inquires, if the landowner will grant us permission to access the property and fossil collect on it. 

We have been very fortunate to remain in good standing with these landowners and as such, we respect their rights as property owners.  With liability issues a big factor these days, this is a real plus for us.  We are covered by our SFMS insurance when we go out in the field on a certified NMGMS field trip.  Permission granted to the club does not mean that individual members or the general public has permission to go on the property on their own.  (The crab site is probably the only exception to this because, it appears that the whole world goes there and the owner has been very gracious in allowing this to take place. I still email him to let him know when NMGMS has a scheduled field trip out there.)

This brings me to another point that I would like to make, and that is to please not make references to exact names or locations of these field trip sites when posting photos or other notes on the Internet.

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