Said Moutaouakil and Mohamed Dahbi dig for shark teeth at a phosphate mine near Khouribga. "I once thought fossils were sacred, that they shouldn't be sold like carpets or dates," says an official at Morocco's Ministry of Energy and Mines. The roughly 50,000 Moroccan poor whose lives depend on this business helped change his mind.
By Lewis M. Simons
Arguments between scientists and businessmen over the influence of money are as old as science itself, and fossil dealers around the world make no bones about their profit motive. Many insist that their business makes an important contribution to educating ordinary people, children in particular. Many of today's fossil dealers as well as professional paleontologists learned to love old bones when, as children, they spotted a pretty specimen in a roadside rock shop. Abdullah Aaronson is no exception. He's been around fossils since childhood. But the 28-year-old American citizen, who was born and has lived all his life in Morocco, also makes the justifiable claim that his business allows some of the desert kingdom's poorest families to survive. One element that distinguishes the Morocco fossil trade from what happens in other countries is that most of it is in trilobites and other invertebrate creatures. Scientists are much more concerned about vertebrate specimens, generally in shorter supply around the world.
Skirting the sandy waves of the Sahara during a two-week drive in the October cool season, Aaronson, photographer Lynn Johnson, and I met scores of Arabs and Berbers searching with pick and shovel for trilobites, large multi-celled creatures that have inhabited the Earth for 600 million years.
Aaronson seemed to know nearly all of the itinerant diggers by name and, since his arrival meant that they might be able to sell their finds, they were thrilled to see him. Again and again he went through the formal, triple-cheek kisses with which Middle Eastern men greet each other. All the while we spoke with Hamed Martou, a Berber nomad who helps support a family of 32 with his fossil digging, he never stopped tapping softball-size chunks of reddish rock with a crude, handmade hammer. He'd first chipped the rocks out of a hip-deep trench that he and others like him have excavated over the last 25 years. The trench runs for nearly 20 miles (30 kilometers), all of it dug by hand, along the base of Mount Issimour, a Devonian period site ten miles (20 kilometers) from the dust-blown crossroads town of Alnif. "If it weren't for Abdullah the American," he said, "our only choice would be to starve or to take the death boat to Spain."
Death boat trips are high-risk voyages that thousands of Moroccans and sub-Saharan Africans make each year in a desperate attempt to find work in Europe. All too often, their overloaded rubber rafts flip. In 2004 more than a hundred people drowned. But Aaronson offers an alternative: Local middlemen, from whom he buys most of his wares, pay the diggers a few dollars for the fossils they dig up. This helps supplement what they can earn from erratic rounds of government roadwork, farm labor, and occasional sales of the goats and camels they tend; in all, barely enough to sustain them and their extended families. The work is less dangerous than the boat trip, but some diggers claw so deep into the sandy soil—often 30 to 40 feet (9 to 10 meters) down and then a gallery at right angles—that the holes may collapse, burying them alive.
Like all the diggers I met in the desert, Martou was as skinny and gnarled as a length of old rope. He wore one end of a blue turban across his mouth and nose to filter out the wind-whipped dust as he gently tapped at the rocks, seeking any slight fissure that would crack them open and pop out a rust-colored trilobite. Most rocks produced nothing, and he tossed them onto a rising heap. "Two finds a day is good," he said. That would earn him perhaps five dollars. Morocco's official minimum daily wage, a figure without much meaning to him, is ten dollars.
As we drove through the desert, Aaronson fielded incessant calls from customers in Europe, the United States, and around Morocco on two madly jangling cell phones. He bought what he considered the best specimens, gradually filling the rear of his Toyota Land Cruiser with heavy cartons. Some of his choices were as small as thimbles, others resembled pizzas. A few he bought directly from the diggers, but most he purchased from wholesalers in dusty market towns such as Rissani and Erfoud, where the fossils were stacked in airless backrooms like loaves on a baker's shelf.
When we reached the quiet town of Erfoud, a center for processing the black, fossilized marble quarried nearby, Aaronson offloaded his purchases to Hmad Ouakki, who runs one of Morocco's best preparation labs. In a bright, window-lined space on the roof of his three-story home, Ouakki and his two brothers use delicate hand tools and compressed-air abrasion to bring fossils into high, exquisitely detailed relief from the surrounding rock matrix. What comes from the earth as a shapeless blob may slowly reveal antennae and a housefly's amazingly complex eyes. A few weeks later Aaronson took a ton of fossil material—perhaps 35,000 pieces—to the Tucson Gem and Mineral Show, where prices vary greatly. While one prized trilobite that Aaronson spent hundreds of hours prepping sold for $4,000, shark teeth went for ten cents each.
"We do OK," Aaronson said over coffee at the comfortable suburban-style home in Rabat that he shares with his wife and business partner, Meredith, a Houston-area native. "But you don't go into this business unless you love fossils. The work is too hard and there are too many hassles. I do it because the fossils are so beautiful and the history of the Earth is so incredibly fascinating."
At the Ministry of Energy and Mines, a short drive from the Aaronsons' home, I spoke with an official and expert in Morocco's "geological patrimony." When he began his work a few years ago, he said he shared the views of American paleontologists, that fossils were "something sacred, that they shouldn't be sold abroad like carpets or dates." But recently, he said, he completed a survey of fossil diggers, "and I was horrified to learn that so many people, perhaps 50,000, all very poor, live off this business. When I saw the conditions under which they dig, I felt like crying. Still, their lives are better than they were before they got into this business. And, if our government were to maintain my original position, what could we offer them as an alternative? Nothing."
The stark black-and-white divide between saving a fossil and saving a human life may not seem applicable in the continuing struggle among dealers and paleontologists in the United States. At the same time, who can argue with certainty that one person's passion to study bones in a laboratory is worth more than another person's passion to place that bone on a mantelpiece? The answer, if there is one, must be written in shades of gray.
